Friday I read about Northpoint Expeditionary Learning Academy, a new high school in Prescott Arizona, that’s trying to do something different. It’s not just a school with a chalkboard, desks, students and teachers. You can read more about the school by following the link above. The Bill and Melinda Gates foundation thinks enough of the effort to give them a $600,000 grant.
As part of their new school, Northpoint is going to be sure that each of its 100 students has a laptop to use. I smiled when I heard this. More schools need to think beyond computers fixed to desks. One of the goals for the school, for instance, is to do without printers, unnecessary paper, textbooks and the like. They want to be digital. Combine all of this with the fact that part of the school’s charter is to have students field work and you might be thinking that Northpoint would be an ideal school to adopt Tablet PCs. Unfortunately, they aren’t. They will be using Apple laptops.
Why? Cost.
I emailed the Northpoint principal and she said that cost was the major issue. They looked at PCs (including Tablets) but the prices were not that competitive.
You can read about the school board’s efforts to pay for the Apple laptops here. The school will be leasing each laptop for $375/year. The school district will cover $225 of the cost and the parents will be required to pay the remaining $150.
These numbers show how attractive the Apple laptop can be. It’s hard to beat $375.
Too bad there isn’t a Tablet manufacturer that can match this. Who knows, there may be. Actually, my guess is that the PC companies would just as soon sell or discount an ordinary PC versus a Tablet. And once you do that, you give up on the one competitive advantage that a PC company might have–the expressive, freeform nature of Tablet PCs and ink. There are so many opportunities here.
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