Respected educator praises Mac
Kia Ora Koutou
Thank you for the opportunity to contribute to this important decision that you are making.
First a little of my background. I have been principal of a small country school of 44 pupils in rural Napier, a large, low decile, 10% European, urban school of 620 pupils in west Auckland, and am currently principal of a quite new school in a rapidly developing developing area with just over 400 pupils.
I have been a presenter for TUANZ national conferences, for UNESCO at international conference in Wellington, national and international Reading conferences, for the International Principals Federation, for an Australasian Health Promoting Schools conference, for First Time Principal's conferences and was invited to be one of 20 mentors for First Time Principals throughout New Zealand. I have presented at ICT conferences all over New Zealand, showcasing what any child can do if given the tools, the motivation and the opportunity. I was also used by our Ministry to present to "Beacon School" principals sent out by the British government to learn from innovative schools and school leaders in New Zealand. I was briefly President of the Waitakere Area Principal's Association (some 92 schools) before taking up my latest appointment. Finally, I received an award for my services to education from the Waitakere City Council.
I come to this debate between PC and Mac with considerable experience - namely being principal of a Mac only school and more recently, a PC only school. At Pomaria we ran a network of 135 Macs, running on OSX Server with Apple Administrator Toolkit and web doubler for internet security via a Mac proxy server. We had both ethernet and Apple Airport wireless networking. All staff had Apple iBook laptops, we had at least two iMacs in each classroom, a digital lab with a class set of iMacs, a digital classroom with all children working on iBooks and a pod of 30 iBooks that were able to be booked by classrooms and/or children for use.
At Te Akau ki Papamoa we had a wired network of 80 Compaq PCs. All staff had Compaq notebooks running Windows XP. Classrooms had Compaq tower machines running XP. Classroom withdrawal spaces had Compaq desktops running Windows '98 or XP. We had a server bought just two years ago running Windows NT server software.
There are a number of issues that must be addressed at this point
Cost
Reliability - including vulnerability factor
Ease of use - including frustration factor
Creativity quotient - includes Higher Order Thinking potential
Connectivity
Service, support and software
Cost - There used to be an argument that Macs were dearer - but only initially. That is simply not true any more; there are numerous articles and tests that prove this. The most important factor to consider when looking at cost is total cost of ownership. The Gartner Group did a three-year study based around two large universities in Australia. Their findings - cost of ownership of a Mac over three years was one third of the cost of a PC.
My experience - at Pomaria we had 135 Macs. In six and a half years I paid for one repair, the power supply on an original (pre iMac) desktop died, cost $600. The equivalent of an electric jug element burning out after six years. We did have some repairs done during that time but all were under warranty - and no we didn't buy extended warranties. Our network went "down" once for a half a day, once in six and a half years. We pushed our network too, by streaming digital video via our intranet. In my last year at Pomaria I had an Apple technician in to help with day-to-day maintenance. That cost me $1,800 for the year.
At Te Akau ki Paapamoa we had the best networking technology wired in as it was built (we turn five years old this April). At Pomaria we put the ethernet network in ourselves - from scratch and into a 1963 built school.
At Te Akau ki Papamoa with only 80 PCs compared to 135 Macs, and many of the Macs being much older than the PCs, we spent $42,500 over a three-year period just to support and maintain those PCs and the network. That cost does not include the cost of dead machines, or the cost of repairing machines out of warranty, just the cost of day-to-day support.
Two years ago Te Akau ki Papamoa spent $35,000 on a Server machine for their network. It had a 50 gig hard drive, a gig of ram and served the network at 100 Base T speed. Windows NT Server software was purchased separately. This year we bought a Mac Sever. It is a dual processor model operating internally at about ten times the processor speed of the PC. It has a 500 gig hard drive, two gigs of ram and serves the network at 1000 Base T speed. It came with OSX Server software. The total cost, around $5,000.
Reliability - This is closely linked to cost and most of the information needed has been mentioned. Compare $42,550 for 80 machines over three years with $1,800 for 135 machines over six and a half years. Our staff at Te Akau ki Papamoa had all but reached breaking point by the time I arrived. The network seemed to always be down, most often when they most needed it - e.g. for parent interviews that were held with every parent, every term.
In six and a half years at Pomaria we never had a virus or trojan horse or any of the other myriad Windows attacking nasties. At Te Akau ki Papamoa we had what was supposedly state of the art anti-virus protection. Unfortunately a staff member took their laptop home to do some work, brought a virus back and took down our whole network for a week. A lot of files were irretrievably damaged and a lot of staff were very, very frustrated.
Ease of use - there is extensive data around to show that children will learn to work with pretty much any system that is thrown at them - children are "digital natives". Staff are the key though and they are "digital second language". In my extensive experience, staff do far more, far sooner and with far greater ease when working on a Mac. There are numerous thorough studies that prove this. Macs are truly plug and play. We have GarageBand on all our Macs at Te Akau ki Papamoa. We purchased some USB plug in music keyboards for them. The Mac instructions said, plug it in and away you go. There were eight pages of instructions for Windows XP. XP is supposed to be plug and play, in reality we have found it so often just isn't.
At this point I should say that the accumulated frustration of our staff after three years with Compaq only computers was so great that they jumped at the idea of us changing to become a Mac school. It should be noted that Compaq were attempting to combat a Mac dominance in the Bay of Plenty and put their total weight behind trying to make Te Akau ki Papmoa "the world's leading school in digital technology". That is a direct quote, and a very sad joke as it turned out.
Creativity quotient - includes Higher Order Thinking potential - At Te Akau ki Papamoa, children and staff were using PowerPoint for everything. Some used hyperlinks; most used it as a word processor. Children typically wrote poems, stories or reports, added some clip art and printed it over the network on the photocopier. This is not an exaggeration; this was the high point of technologies use for 90% of children. Some children used digital cameras to add photos to their PowerPoint projects. I saw one PowerPoint slide show produced. It was presented to a huge gathering of parents on the night I was welcomed to the community. Sadly the sound wouldn't play with the project, the computer then crashed and the children were unable to show their work. You'll understand my comment earlier about a sad joke.
At Pomaria, with a roll of 42% Maori, 32% Polynesian and 57 ethnicities, we won three national digital music competitions, two national digital video competitions, were runner up in the "Fair Go" ad awards, and then won it the following year. Had our children's work showcased in Singapore (by Ian Taylor of America's Cup animation etc fame), London, Australia and all over New Zealand. We had children in year three editing digital video and year two children producing digital music projects that would simply stun you. I forgot to mention our digital music studio - a converted boys' toilet. We put hessian board on the walls, got some old multi media Macs from the advisory service for $100 each, an iMac, some Roland keyboards (we won in a digital music competition) and an old stereo and mixer out of Trade and Exchange.
The way we use Macs provides huge opportunity for children to apply Higher Order Thinking and Problem Solving skills. More on that later.
Connectivity - As mentioned earlier, Macs are truly plug and play. We have four wireless Airport base stations around our spread-out school. When you move your iBook around the school, it automatically detects when it moves into a zone where a new base station is putting out a stronger signal. The iBook automatically switches to the stronger signal base station with no interruption. An XP laptop would need to be told to switch over. It's a small example but pertinent and indicative of many similar ease-of-use, connectivity advantages offered by the Mac.
Service - Macs are reliable. PCs simply are not. Perhaps in ideal situations such as a home machine or even a small office network. When you have a network of 135 machines and 650 users using them on a daily basis, reliability is vital but is also a huge challenge. Kids always push the boundaries. As stated, we had only one paid-for repair, our network down for only half a day and support costs of $1,800.
We have a book at Te Akau ki Papamoa for writing in computer complaints. For three years in a row, the same problems kept appearing. Can't connect to the network, can't print, keeps crashing, can't get photos to download, and on and on and on. One message says, "I've been writing the same message in here for three years straight, if somebody doesn't do something, so help me God I'll throw the damn thing out the window." This was a senior leader in our school who had a Windows XP laptop that was less than a year old. She had been having the exact same problem with her earlier laptop as well and had truly reached breaking point.
Support - I have a Mac guy come in up to once a fortnight for up to two hours to help with things like, setting up the server, setting up the lab of iMacs (we installed a fresh operating system on each of them by saving a disk image to the serve, network booting the iMacs and cloning them from the disc image - worked flawlessly), etc.
Software - Macs come with the iLife suite of powerful, creative software (buying the equivalent on a PC would cost an extra $900, which is why they only used PowerPoint previously). iLife has iPhoto, iTunes, iDVD, iMovie and GargeBand. That last piece of software alone is reason to go with Macs. If you haven't seen it in action, you must. It has helped transform our school. A number of children who were frustrated with school were bullying others at lunch and intervals. Those children were given the opportunity to create music using GarageBand at those 'free' times and are now much too busy and much too happy to feel the need to bully.
We have had Macs at Te Akau ki Papamoa for one year now. All staff have iBooks, we have an eMac in each classroom, a lab of 15 old iMacs in the back of our library, a Mac OSX Server, Macs in our office (our office manager replaced two desktop PCs and a laptop with one iBook to do everything that the three PCs did - only much more easily she says). In that year we have not had a single problem that took more than five minutes to solve. Our Mac server has never gone down and of course we are safe from viruses.
Let me contrast that with the PC story. To appease our (now previous) Board Chairperson who was (it seemed to many, irrationally) pro PC, we commissioned him to build 16 state of the art PCs - one for each classroom. These cost over three thousand dollars more than 16 eMacs, which we bought at the same time. Only half of the PCs had firewire and were capable of editing digital video. All the eMacs had firewire and were capable of editing digital video. The eMacs were installed and running within one week of arriving. The PCs posed continual problems. The last one was successfully installed in January of this year - not one week but one year later. Two of them now sound like trucks and the cheap plastic fascia has cracked on many of them. The eMacs are built for education with children in mind. They are unmarked (apart from grubby finger prints on their flat screens), and are functioning flawlessly. Last year, children using the new PCs for PowerPoint work regularly had them crash mid-project and lost their work.
The key is not to have a huge number of computers, it is to have hugely capable computers that are intuitive to use, are reliable, encourage higher order thinking and problem solving and are fun to use. The other day a teacher asked one of our brightest year eight students, which he preferred, Macs or PCs. "Oh Macs of course," he said. "You can do so much more, so much easier on a Mac. No contest," he said.
When all is said and done, we are here not to give children what we are used to, what we know from our work place or what we think might be cheapest. Forget thinking that kids need to know Windows for work. Computing is changing and developing at exponential speed (i.e. Moore's Law). What we must do is give children the best tools to allow them to challenge themselves and their thinking, to allow them to create and communicate with confidence and ease. As an example, our children last year put together an ad for the Fair Go ad awards, they didn't win but all who saw it thought it was exceptional. As another example, others put together a video as a culmination of a study of "Pania of the Reef." One group wrote a poem re-telling the story form 'her' point of view, another choreographed a dance to fit the poem, another composed music (using GarageBand to fit the dance) and another group planned a way to film the dance and make it appear that the dancers were actually dancing on the sea. They had a producer, director, film crew, sound crew, stage crew etc. They used 'greenscreen' sheets and hand held lights and made it all work. This all required huge cooperation, problem solving and thinking and planning skills. The end result was amazing. Macs helped make it happen. Compare that with Powerpoint poems and clip art printed to the photocopier.
The children and teachers at Te Akau ki Papmoa have had a better chance to judge than probably any other school in the country. It couldn't have been more ideally set up for PCs to succeed. The truth is, it failed utterly and miserably. They all resoundingly agree, Macs are the only way to go. I am absolutely passionate about educating children and giving them the very, very best I can. Your children deserve the best. If you agree, I believe you will ensure they have Macs to work on. You won't regret it and your staff and children will surely thank you for it.
I didn't want to say this as it would offend, but at some point the Board probably need to realise that this is an education decision, a management as opposed to governance decision. Initial costs being about equal, (long term costs being heavily in favour of the Mac), the issue becomes, what is in the best educational interests of the children. As educational leader of your school, that decision should fall in your domain. maybe you can get some support from someone to raise this point with the Board.
Good luck and God Bless
Regards
Ash Maindonald
Principal Te Akau ki Papamoa School
