Monthly Archives: May 2012

Celebrity Smackdown: iPad vs. Laptop

Apple, Computers, Hardware, Teaching

Celebrity Smackdown: iPad vs. Laptop

2012-05-29

by Richard White

It’s a simple question, really. You’re a forward-thinking guy or gal, and you’re thinking about updating the hardware at your school, or perhaps even getting into a 1-to-1 program, or a Bring Your Down Device agreement with your student body.

What do you do: go with iPads, or laptops?

Before we break this down, let me give you my qualifications, in case you were worried. I have a tendency to favor Apple-based solutions for many situations, both for the high-build quality of their hardware and the relative stability, reliability, and ease-of-use of their software. I have a MacBook Pro that I run OS X on, although I’ve also run Windows 7 on that machine as well. I have a PC desktop at home running Ubuntu, and a Lenovo netbook (x100e, no CD/DVD drive) that I run Windows 7 and Ubuntu on. My cellphone is an iPhone 4, and I waited in line for the original iPad, and purchased the “iPad 3” when it came out.

Another point of reference: I work at a school that officially supports both Microsoft Windows and Apple OS X machines. That same school currently uses classroom carts of machines–PCs, Macs, and iPads–to give students access to computers on an as-needed basis.

I’ve been accused of being an Apple fan-boy, and am somewhat guilty as charged. But what about this iPad vs. laptops showdown? If you only had one device to buy, which would it be?

  iPad laptop/netbook
Time to wake from sleep ~ 1 second 3-10 seconds
Battery life ~ 10 hours 1 – 4 hours
Availability of applications Many, most modified to run on the iPad. Available only through iTunes. Many, with availability of certain titles dependent on operating system
Interface usability Touch interface, not suitable for extended typing. External keyboards available. Keyboard and trackpad, with usability dependent on keyboard size, manufacturer.
File management No access to file system. Apps may have some ability to share files, but third-party solutions (Dropbox, Air Sharing, etc.) necessary to move files around. Organizing and moving files done with operating system.
Cost Base model: $499 Varies depending on manufacturer, model. (Lenovo G570, 15.6″ screen, i5 processor, 8G RAM, 750G HDD, Windows 7 Home Premium = $569 sale price)
Security Applications heavily policed by Apple, Inc and sandboxed. No user access to filesystem. OS X relatively safe, Windows typically requires running anti-virus software.
Strengths Near instantaneous wake from sleep and outstanding battery life. Listening to music, surfing the Internet, reading PDFs, are all dead easy straight out of the box. Does everything, conforms to current paradigm of computing. Easily customizable. Runs Flash and Java applications.
Weaknesses No “real” keyboard. Programs limited in availability (Microsoft Office suite not currently available) or function (Photoshop Touch doesn’t have full feature set). Doesn’t allow access to file system. Can’t display Flash files or run Java applications. Relatively limited battery life. Use requires knowing how to navigate the operating system, manage files.

Does that clear things up? At my school, for some teachers the iPads have literally transformed the way they conduct their classes, with students reading course handouts on them, writing papers on them, uploading them to the instructor via Dropbox, and the instructor annotating their work and returning it to them via email.

For other teachers, the iPad is a non-starter. The Physics classes are unable to run Java-based animations, and the programming class is unable to launch a Terminal or write Python programs.

My recommendation for teachers is that use cases be examined very carefully. For all the talk of a “post-PC world” with “cloud-based storage,” we’re not there yet. As an educator who, in addition to teaching subject-area content is also helping students master the technological tools that they’ll use in college and in business, I strongly feel that there’s so much more to technology than pointing and tapping. Students who are unable to right-click, or “Save As…”, or create a new folder for organizing their files, haven’t been well served.

iPads satisfy some needs for some teachers, it’s clear, and may be part of the educational technology equation for some schools. For an institution with limited resources, however, money will be better spent on laptops. And for schools considering a “one device to one child” program, committing to the iPad–the device du jour–is, in my opinion, short-sighted.

Cleaning Up Your Desk(top)

Workflow

CLEANING UP YOUR DESK(TOP)

2012-05-17

by Richard White

I’m a physics teacher, so I totally get that whole entropy thing.

You know. The Second Law of Thermodynamics?

No?

The general idea is that the universe is getting increasingly disorganized, always. An chicken egg, which starts out pretty organized (shell on the outside, yolk and albumen and stuff on the inside) gets broken, and can never get put back together again. A teenager’s bedroom gets cleaned at some point, and in a shockingly short period of time turns into complete and utter disarray.

Yes, that Second Law of Thermodynamics.

The desktop on your computer, which is currently showing dozens of little files on it if you’re like everyone else, is in some disarray, and needs some cleaning. You should organize those files, and tuck them into some little folders somewhere in your Documents folder. It won’t take long, and you’ll thank me for it later.

“Why?” you ask—”I’ve survived just fine up to this point, and besides, I know where everything is.”

Well, that may be. And I don’t ordinarily like to preach that whole “my way or the highway” thing, but… look, you wouldn’t invite me over to your house until you had a chance to straighten things up a bit, right? Because living in squalor is nobody’s idea of “pretty.” The grubby state of your house tends to reflect a certain carelessness on your part, and perhaps even a health risk, depending on how long it’s been since you washed those dishes. It may even be hard to find things, and you end up wandering about a bit, looking for where you put the keys, or that can of soda, or that bill that needed to be paid.

In that same way, the desktop on your computer—and yes, I’m preaching now—reflects your approach to managing your digital life. You need to clean up your desktop once in awhile. Get those files that you’ve saved there organized into a folder or three, or tuck them away into the appropriate folder in your Documents. If you’ve got 5-10 folders sitting there on the desktop right now and you’re sort of using them, that’s alright. Don’t freak out about it. But if you haven’t looked at that document in a week or three, put it away some place, because on your desktop, it’s just cluttering things up.

“What do you care?” you ask. Good. I don’t! I don’t care about your desktop as long as I don’t have to help you fix your computer. But if I need to sit down and figure out what’s going on with your broken machine, I don’t want to look at your messy house. I’ll probably need to clear some space there, too, so I can download some system updates, install new software, etc. I’ll probably also be trying to clean your disk up a bit, and that’s harder for me to do if you have boatloads of random crap lying around on your hard drive.

Most importantly, though, (cue disapproving Dad tone of voice here)… If you won’t do it for me, do it for yourself. Developing an organized approach to managing and storing the files on your computer will make it much easier for you to find things when you need them. It’ll improve the efficiency of your workflow.

It’ll make you a better person.

Go clean your room Desktop.