Apple, maker of iPads and other shiny tech gadgets, last week chose an unusual venue for its latest press event — an inner-city Chicago magnet high school called Lane Tech College Prep.
The Silicon Valley tech company could just as well have selected St. Paul’s Central High School or another district school for its first big 2018 product unveiling — an event that happened to be aggressively education-focused.
The new Apple product, a low-cost iPad tablet aimed squarely at the school market, is right in line with a major St. Paul-schools iPad deployment that is now in its fourth year.
The St. Paul district this school year executed an epic swap-out of old iPad models issued to about 40,000 students and staffers, replacing the aging devices with newer tablets.
This puts the St. Paul district and others, such as Minnetonka Public Schools, at the cutting edge of educational technology.
It also makes them, increasingly, anomalous.
EATING APPLE’S LUNCH
The education-technology market has largely not been going Apple’s way in recent years, for all of its efforts to make its iPads and Macintosh computers the go-to classroom computers everywhere.
Apple faces fierce competition from Chromebooks, which are Web-centric, Google-flavored laptops that are inexpensive for school districts to purchase en masse — iPads are typically pricier — and are a breeze for school IT managers to deploy and manage.
Students on Chromebooks use Google’s simplified Chrome OS operating system and log into free Google accounts, which are now all but ubiquitous in education.
East-metro schools using Chromebooks include Minnesota Virtual High School, based in downtown St. Paul, and the Burnsville-Savage-Eagan district.
Google, to use a school-cafeteria analogy, is eating Apple’s lunch.
In the U.S. K-12 market, Chromebooks accounted for nearly 60 percent of mobile computer shipments in the third quarter of 2017, up from 50 percent in 2015 and 38 percent in 2014, according to United Kingdom-based Futuresource Consulting.
By comparison, devices running Apple’s iOS operating system (typically iPads, in this context) were at 14.3 percent in 2017’s third quarter, down from 19 percent in 2015 and 26 percent in 2014, according to Futuresource.
It’s no wonder Apple last week elected not to use its spiffy auditorium on its new Apple Park campus in California for its latest media event, instead making a bold “look out, Google” statement by surrounding itself with students and educators as it unleashed a barrage of school-related announcements to show it’s serious about staying competitive in the classroom.
The announcements included that new iPad, which is Apple’s first entry-level tablet to be compatible with its Pencil stylus (until now reserved for high-end iPad Pro models). The tablet is priced at $299 for education customers and $329 for the public.
The announcements also included updates to its iWork productivity software with advanced annotation features and improved e-book-publishing features, among others. The iWork suite competes with Google’s G Suite, which is strong in education.
In addition, Apple showed off tools for educators, including a new Schoolwork service for managing class activities, improvements to Apple services for deploying and managing iPads, and updates to Apple Teacher online training.
Apple used its high-school setting to great effect, having Lane Tech College Prep educators harness the new iPad for all manner of tech demos as the press looked on, instead of setting up the usual “hands-on” demonstration area for journalists.
The Googleverse was not idle last week, either.
Acer, one of the top Chromebook makers, took aim at Apple and its iPad when it unveiled the first education tablet using Google’s Chrome OS. The Chromebook Tab 10, which like the iPad has stylus support, is priced at $329 for all buyers.
Such a tablet faces an uphill battle, though, because Apple has a virtual lock on the tablet market in general.
Such products lay the groundwork for a grinding Google-vs.-Apple school arms race that is playing out, among many other places, right here in St. Paul.
VIRTUAL HIGH GOES GOOGLE
It doesn’t look like a traditional school, but the unassuming offices just off downtown St. Paul’s Mears Park are a buzzing nerve center for public-education activity that stretches statewide.
Minnesota Virtual High School is a fully accredited public high school, with a twist — classes are conducted almost entirely online with students who are in almost every county statewide.
Virtual High has about 150 part-time students (who also enroll at schools in their geographical areas) and about 450 full-time students. The latter are of most relevance to Google in education because they all wield school-supplied Chromebooks for use in their studies.
“Everything we do is designed around access to a Chromebook,” said Principal Bill Glenz.
Students log into their Google accounts on the device and are good to go, he noted, with access to tools such as Google’s Web-based G Suite productivity apps for word processing, number crunching and presentation authoring. These are very popular largely due to their robust collaboration features.
On a tight tech-buying budget, one reporter compares Chromebooks and iPads
Virtual High used Google accounts before the Chromebooks came along, so the Web-centric laptops were an excellent fit when the laptops initially were deployed — to lower-income students, at first — about six years ago.
The latest Chromebooks in use at Virtual High incorporate touch screens for tablet-like work, such as the rapid sketching out of math formulas, and are said to be reasonably robust and repairable.
What’s more, Glenz said, the Chromebooks are affordable at about $220, and he added that non-touch Chromebooks for the classroom go as low as $150 (though often with subpar build quality).
Virtual High took a look at iPads, he said, and they we deemed unsuitable for a number of reasons. They don’t have keyboards, and adding wireless keyboards hikes the cost and is clunky at best, Glenz believes.
“You have to have a keyboard, and not some wonky Bluetooth thing,” he said. “An integrated, fully functional keyboard is really critical.”
Some Web-based content is inaccessible on the iPad, as well, partly because the tablet can’t display sites powered by Adobe Flash software.
Glenz added that Chromebooks are simple to set up, deploy and manage. The only headache, which isn’t on Google, is retrieving them from outstate students when their studies are complete, he said.
Glenz added, “why wouldn’t you have a device literally made for a Google account at a price significantly less than” that of a traditional laptop or an iPad?
ALL-IN WITH THE IPAD
Kids clutching iPads in protective cases have become a familiar sight inside St. Paul schools in the four years since the district began equipping K-12 students and staffers with the Apple tablets.
This has caused new and interesting things to happen. Instructors have been known to set children loose in school hallways to use their tablets as over-sized cameras for capturing geometric shapes in the environment, among other iPad-friendly assignments.
The district’s message here is clear — Don’t try that with a Chromebook.
The fact that an iPad isn’t a laptop-style device is exactly the point, said Hans Ott, assistant superintendent of teaching and learning. Traditional clamshell-style computers keep students doing too-traditional tasks like typing papers and creating slide decks.
Apple tablets are, by comparison, freeing, he believes.
This is the message Apple tried to get across at the Chicago press event with a video showing a group of students working on a group science project and harnessing the iPad’s camera and other features.
The St. Paul school district is not unlike those using Chromebooks in that it also relies heavily on Google services such as the G Suite apps, along with Google Drive for online storage. These services can be use on iPads as well as on Chromebooks.
But recent updates to Apple’s own software and services are generating some excitement.
New e-book-authoring features in Apple’s Pages word-processing app are a big deal, said Maijue Lochungvu, personalized learning program manager in the district’s office of teaching and learning. So are the 200 gigabytes of online storage Apple is now offering to students, up from 5 gigs per kid, which Lochungvu thinks might be a game changer.
At the same time, the district has taken steps to address what have been seen as the iPad’s shortcomings.
The lack of a physical keyboard is one of them. At one time, students toted tablets in cases that did not incorporate a keyboard.
That changed with the new wave of district-distributed Apple tablets, which are being paired with a rugged Logitech case that comes with a detachable keyboard. This transforms the iPad into a laptop of sorts when that is necessary.
WHAT ABOUT COSTS?
The St. Paul district still pays a premium compared with districts that have opted for Chromebooks. Though Apple offers iPads to education at a not-bad $299 per tablet, it is still more expensive than most educational Chromebooks — and this doesn’t factor in add-on iPad accessories, such as keyboard cases and the Pencil stylus, which add to the cost.
But some think iPads in the long run don’t end up being egregiously expensive after every factor is weighed in — what is often called “total cost of ownership.”
Minnetonka Public Schools, another district that began distributing iPads years ago and now has about 6,600 of them deployed, said each tablet with a case has cost it about $400.
But because it found the iPads to be of high quality and long life, the tablets could be kept in use in a succession of classrooms for a half decade at what ended up running the district 44 cents a day — or “less than one Starbucks medium cup of coffee a week,” Dave Eisenmann, the district director of instructional technology, wrote in a 2015 blog post.
He later amended the figure to 38 cents after the district was able to sell off older iPads and apply that revenue to the purchase of newer Apple tablets. He has also purchased a few Chromebooks as an experiment, but is not confident they will last as long as the iPads have. If not, he said, they would prove more expensive in the long run despite their lower initial cost.
“Colleagues in other school districts with Chromebook implementations have told me about the difficulty they have had finding a well-built device that will hold up to classroom use,” Eisenmann wrote. “They have had bad luck with the inexpensive models they purchased.”
The Minnetonka-district iPad program is now in its seventh year and, by all accounts, still going strong.
