Remember when the superintendent for Los Angeles Unified School District had big plans to give an iPad to all 640,000 of their students?
Well, they have a new superintendent.
“I don’t believe we can afford a device for every student,” Cortines told the Los Angeles Times, “Education shouldn’t become the gimmick of the year.” Cortines added that LAUSD had never made a definitive plan for how teachers would have used the iPads during instruction, nor had it planned how it was going to pay for the tablets over time.
I’m not sure what he means by education “becoming” the gimmick of the year since, for as long as I can remember, we’ve had a new gimmick almost every year. Sometimes more than one.
And that gimmick was often some kind of technology, distributed with vague plans for instructional use, and no sustainable funding plan.