A MAC is not a PC

Over the weekend, the whole Utech Tipster team descended on a workshop at the Hyatt called “Digital Tools for Digital Kids: An Apple seminar for international schools”

Over at the Thinking Stick, our fearless leader reflects on the experience and comes away with a strange reflection, which to the untrained eye makes a lot of sense.

But at the end of the day it’s just hardware.

As I was listening to the presentation I keep thinking back to a day
when a similar presentation might have taken place…only over the #2
Pencil. Think about that the next time you’re listening to a
presentation.

I
don’t care if you have 20 computers in a classroom or 20 pencils. They
can not do or change education without the instructor understanding
what can be done with the tool they have been given. We do not ask
students to use a pencil to read with, because we know that’s not what
a pencil does. Educators understand what a pencil can and can not do.
We have used it, tested it, and found its limits.

What follows is my rebuttal of sorts. In the spirit of full disclosure, I am a Macfan boy from way back. I have worked duel platform most of my professional life–I learned how to program on a Apple II-e in Grade 10 Computer Science class, but when I bought my first computer it was a used NEC laptop with WordPerfect saving my life. And this is typed on my Dell Desktop.

I both agree and disagree with Jeff’s sentiment: He is absolutely right that without address the pedagogy the boxes make no difference. But to say it’s just hardware misleads the uniformed. Before the pencil, there was chalk and slate which limited the students to a particular type of activity and length of response. With the advent of Pencil and paper in the classroom (and the switch from fountain pen to ballpoint), different activities were now possible. For the old slate teachers, some still delivered in the one slate at a time.

Take a look at the two platforms our teachers have to choose from:

• Moodle
• Edline

Both allow for class webpages.
Both allow email contact with students.
Both allow for posting of content and assignments.
But only one does it well. And it has many features built right in, like discussion boards, that are transforming the experience of some of our students and teachers.

PCs, and here specifically, I would say Dell, HP Lenovo etc. that rely on the Windows interface are like edline. They can do the job. And with some tinker it does most of what the other one, Moodle, just does. Years ago some one wrote a book called the MAC is not a typewriter because people kept up their “good” typing habits (my mom taught typing for many years) such as inserting 2 spaces after a period. This has to do with the size of a particular character on a page and allowing for the extra space to differentiate when a full stop has occurred. When Apple introduced the mac, one market they aimed to own was the desktop publishing. A computer could be clever and actually figure out the kerning needed (the space between letters). But everyone’s old habits died hard.

A Mac is not a PC. Yet it is. It is one that just does it. I almost wrote “right” at the end there but that just makes me sound like more of a fanboy than I am. Apple is willing to not only tackle the issue to make better, easier to use software and hardware, but they provide training as part of the package. Who else does that? What other computer maker else tackles the pedagogy?

In closing, let me leave you a story about how useless macs are when the pedagogy is not addressed: A school received a beautiful imac 15 inch flat panel screen…and it sat in a box. In the IT director’s office, who did not have enough time to open it up because he was too busy chasing virus, and fixing laptops from Dell.

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