The Open EDge

I received the following email on the California Education Technology Professionals Association (CETPA) listserve the other day:

----- Message from xxx@yyyy.zzz ---------
Date: Mon, 12 Apr 2010 08:13:49 -0700
From: Tech Coord
Subject: [edtech] Interactive Boards
To: edtech@lists.cetpa-k12.org
In case you wonder about the hype and what can be done with interactive boards, check out what this math teacher does:

http://www.urlesque.com/2010/04/06/math-teacher-pranks/?icid=main|htmlws-main

~Tech Coord

And I must confess, I lost it. My response:

As you may already be aware, the State of California has been holding ARRA EETT technology dollars hostage, in an attempt to take these funds and use them for other purposes in Sacramento. According to grant rules and guidelines, by accepting these funds from Washington the state agreed to disburse them in the same fashion as regular EETT Round 8 funds. However, after the entire competitive grant application process was complete and applications were submitted by hundreds of districts (at significant cost to those districts), the CA State Assembly Joint Legislative Budget Committee, led by Senator Denise Ducheny, blocked the disbursement of the funds and sought the advice of the Legislative Analyst's Office, in an effort to redirect them. The Legislative Analyst's Office 2010-11 Budget Recommendations completely ignore the federal guidelines. Districts across the state have been awaiting these funds to move forward with a number of education technology initiatives and to save jobs that will soon be lost as budgets continue to tighten.

As mentioned in my prior post, no netbook review would be complete without a look at what Lenovo has to offer. It took quite a while to get it, and once again my Lenovo rep urged me to look away from this line and toward the Thinkpad line (especially the X100e) due to lack of long term support. At first, I thought this was just marketing, but have come to discover from a number of districts in several states who have deployed anywhere from hundreds to thousands of older S10 models that they are finding Lenovo slow to respond to their service needs and say that it is becoming increasingly difficult to get parts for them, even for units that are less than one year old. Amazingly, my Lenovo rep, who had just returned from visiting a school district with more than 1000 units deployed, shared a similar story of that district's frustration with Lenovo service. I must say, I'm a bit surprised by (and appreciative of) such honesty from a company representative (don't get much of that these days) but I'm also mystified by what appears to be a company-wide strategy to push customers to a more expensive line through disservice. I can only assume it will backfire, as it has with us.

Just the same, the hardware is certainly worthy of a look, so on with the review!