Byron,
Our school has gone totally to the dark side, other than the two or three Apple IIes 
with color monitors working in the 1st grade school and kindergarten.  Our supt brags 
that we have nearly a thousand computers in a school of 2000 students. One for every 2 
students?  Sounds good, but, think again.  All of our grades are doing AR, Advanced 
Reading or something.  The best computers sit in a computer lab and are only used to 
test the kids to see if they are ready to move to another higher book. I've been in 
those labs while students were taking tests, and they simply couldn't read the 
questions much less type in the correct answer.  I personally believe that using 
computers in that manner has set our schools' reading programs back many, many years. 
For kids to learn to read, it still takes one-on-one reading, if parents aren't 
reading at home.

The Apple IIes chug along and the teachers know if there disk fails, they can call me 
for another copy.  Unfortunately, let one of those big, new machines go down, kiss it 
goodbye for the rest of the year.  One tech for 1000 computers. Stupid.

They had dozens of their New Windows computers crashing and could not be revived. 
Problem?  Don't set the computer CPU on the carpet because the static electricity was 
getting to them.  I had all my Macs on the carpet and they weren't crashing.

The students could no longer take diskettes to school with assignments on them for 
fear of viruses.  The high school computer labs were down more than up. When my kids 
graduated from high school, the two boys went to college and quickly found jobs 
because they were Mac Literate.  My youngest worked his way through college as a hired 
staff member being the Mac Tech lab overseer.

Off of topic, but I had 3 TRS-80 Model IVs in one classroom and the teacher simply let 
the kids play on them when they were on the last bus.  The kids loved them. Could just 
easily have been Apple IIes, as well, because the kids learned to use the keyboards, 
understood what a diskette was and what was on them. 

Now days, our kids our non-keyboard literate, using mouses at school and PlayStation 
stuff at home.  Pretty sad, when a computer has so many possibilities, but, ... kids 
go from one grade to the other, computer illiterate.  By the way, in the 3 and 4th 
grades, the classroom computers are all dead windows 95 computers or even less. It's a 
nightmare.

I saw ?Duran Duran, the music group on Jay Leno last night. They had 2 lead guitars, a 
rhythm guitar, a bass guitar, a keyboarder, and a drum set, and sitting gingerly in 
the middle of the group was a Silver Macintosh laptop with the Apple emblem staring at 
you, no matter what camera they used.  I'm not sure how they were using it. Maybe 
iMusic with harmonizing voices. It was an incredible sight. 5 Minutes of free Apple 
advertisement. Incredible sight.

Dale

--
Apple2list is sponsored by <http://lowendmac.com/> and...

    /      Buy books, CDs, videos, and more from Amazon.com     \
   / <http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/redirect-home/lowendmac> \

      Support Low End Mac <http://lowendmac.com/lists/support.html>

Apple2list info:        <http://lowendmac.com/lists/apple2.html>
  --> AOL users, remove "mailto:";
Send list messages to:  <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To unsubscribe, email:  <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
For digest mode, email: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subscription questions: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Archive: <http://www.mail-archive.com/apple2list%40mail.maclaunch.com/>

Using a Mac? Free email & more at Applelinks! http://www.applelinks.com

Reply via email to