Computers in classrooms are worth next to nothing if teachers don’t know what to do with them and Apple is trying to assist educators in this effort more than other computer makers, Charles Haddad opines in his latest Byte of the Apple column for Business Week Online .
In his book, “Oversold and Underused: Computers in the Classroom,” Stanford Professor Emeritus Larry Cuban wrote that no evidence shows that computers in and of themselves solve any of education’s core problems. Though Apple is as guilty as anyone else of “hyping” the powers of classroom computers, Apple has done more than any other company to make computers useful educational tools knows that helping users get the most from computers is a task that goes beyond hardware, Haddad writes. That’s why the company is targeting teaching universities as well as public schools, he adds.
“It has persuaded the teachers’ college at the University of Texas, for example, to require every student to buy an iBook and learn how to use it,” Haddad says. “The university, with Apple’s encouragement, has incorporated into its curriculum instruction in how to use laptops to do everything from create assignments to control and monitor the laptops of students.”
The Mac maker is also promoting training in primary and secondary schools even as it promotes its computers, especially the iBook, as a learning tool, Haddad says.