“The HP Elite Pad has proved to be an unmitigated disaster. We have met with HP representatives on a number of occasions to address the issues.
The story says the switch to e-books was a disaster, but the disaster was HP.
Principal Gleeson said it was “an informed decision” to choose the HP Elite tablet.
“A year and a half’s worth of research was put into choosing the right device for us.
Bullshit. Anyone that did research wouldn’t have chosen an HP tablet—they would have gone with an iPad that is working in classrooms around the world. If I was a parent in this school district, I’d be out for the principal’s head.
I find this sentence particularly revealing: “We wanted a device that was effectively a computer in tablet form for our students, so it would have a word processor, sufficient memory etc.”
They just believed the “no compromise” bs of Microsoft. Oh well.
What’s with that “Generic Photo” that they’re using at the top of the article? I know print media is hurting but couldn’t they have at least found a stock photo that included students using tablet computers??
The byline on the article is odd too. I sent this to Instapaper yesterday and there it’s dated as Nov 21. Clicking the link here serves a page with today’s date. Do they just put the current date at the top of the page? That doesn’t seem right…
As for the principal’s claim they did a year and half of research, that just doesn’t pass the sniff test. They could have just called someone like Fraser Speirs and asked him his experience.
Touting the 64Gb memory is bogus too. Other tablets have that capacity and the HP with Windows 8 installed ends up with only 42Gb available according to PC Magazine.
I like how this Gleeson drone also says “The memory of the HP device is 64GB, it far exceeds other tablets’ memory capacity.” Is that what the nice sales rep told you, sweetie?
Two years ago I did some design work for a company that was trying to develop a tablet-based test-creation product for K–12 tutoring. A management team full of Ph.D.s were spending a lot of time looking at options other than the iPad, having been told that they needed “maximum compatibility” for the product’s deployment. Their concerns were expressed in language they’d heard in marketing materials, about a subject in which most of them had no expertise. And I can easily imagine how their in-house IT guy pushed for anything non-Apple.
Two years later, they’ve apparently standardized on the iPad for their teaching products. I wonder how much time and money they wasted, chasing down promises made by the likes of HP, Motorola, or Blackberry.
Here’s the other side of doing that kind of research: few school officials know who Fraser Speirs is. They don’t read tech blogs, and they don’t follow the consumer tech industry. They’re simply not knowledgeable about very much of the specialized world that, say, readers of The Loop take for granted and consider obvious. And they don’t know who to ask about any of it, either.
That’s low-hanging fruit for opportunist consultants, but not a great incubator for functional tech rollouts.
It took a year and a half to see who would offer the best kickback, no doubt.
that would make more sense.
They just backed the wrong horse. Windows 8 in tablet/laptop form is great but not all devices are created equal.
Very true… If the know anything it’s what the IT department has told them and they’re probably neck-deep in the Microsoft world and don’t care about anything else. If you want had held tablets for the kids, lets get HP ones. Don’t know how that took 18 months though…
Yes, you do. Multiply the number of executives and directors in a company by as many meetings as it takes each of them to express irrelevant opinions about issues that have nothing to do with a technology acquisition.
Maybe these students will grow up to be smarter than their parents… or they may be scarred for life.
They were likely never given a full range of choices to examine in the first place. They went with the sales rep who had the best PowerPoint deck and schwag.
That’s probably true. My wife is an educator so I see some of that side. I’m getting her a Surface 2 this weekend because her iPad just doesn’t suit her [thx Microsoft for the $200 credit for the iPad 2!!].
Districts are terribly locked into Microsoft to the point my wife has frustratingly puts her iPad up and goes to her PC every time she needs to do some work. Simple things like supporting only IE [even though the site clearly works in Chrome or Safari].
Anyways…old policies lead to bad decisions like this. At least they could have went Surface.
What advantages would Surface provide for books, scheduling or testing that iOS developers aren’t already covering? And wouldn’t that simply lock them into the same IE/ActiveX universe that limits cross-platform work?
Integration. They are stacked with Microsoft tech in most districts. Surface also offers printing natively without special printers.
Reading? No clue. They’d be better off with Paperwhites, tbh, but reading on the Surface just sounds clunky [too wide].
Yep…still locked in but staying in your lane vs redoing your entire district is a much safer bet.
Reminds me of the late 90s. Sales reps would bring in whatever the latest PC hardware was and point at the schools 5 year old Macs and proclaim “PCs are so much faster than Macs. Check this out.”
We can’t shake that decade. It never went away.
Depending on what they’re supposed to learn, iPads are a terrible idea. No good way to teach Word processing (please don’t say Pages), no good way to teach programming, no good way to teach working with different apps to assemble something larger, no good way to run projects where you assemble files from different apps…
Kids who learn how to use computers on an iPad will be seriously disadvantaged once they have to work in a place that uses a desktop computer.
Good points.
Wasn’t there a 64 GB model of even the iPad 1
You don’t use iPads to teach computer science, which is basically what all that stuff is. You use a computer.
But for basic textbooks etc, the iPad is fine. And at least Apple has made a firm movement to support education with things like iBooks Author, iTunes U. What has HP or even Microsoft done