A digital divide haunts U.S. schools adapting to virus hurdles

I'm confused. Is the US a third world country? There are tablets or notebook computers for less than a 200$ that can be bought online. And surely you can get monthly subscription for high speed internet for less than 50$ a month.

I'm confused. Is the US a third world country? There are tablets or notebook computers for less than a 200$ that can be bought online. And surely you can get monthly subscription for high speed internet for less than 50$ a month.

$200 times tens of thousands or maybe hundreds of thousands of students adds up very quickly. Our district produced the necessary Chromebooks and had hot spots for homes with internet connections that were too slow (remember a lot of us are soaking up bandwidth teleworking). And oh yeah, the tablets and software can only access official school district sites so the kids are watching cartoons or worse on them. And they have to produce all of this on a week or two notice. So easy. Right?

Agreed, cheaper options available. So, is Japan (¥60,000-70,000 US$550-640) any different @wtfjapan 6:32am as “*a third world country”* ?*: ***

- https://soranews24.com/2021/05/05/kyoto-families-angered-by-new-policy-forcing-high-school-students-to-buy-tablets-at-own-expense/

-@wtfjapan 6:32am: “I'm confused. Is the US a third world country? There are tablets or notebook computers for less than a 200$ that can be bought online. And surely you can get monthly subscription for high speed internet for less than 50$ a month.” -

There are now US programs that obligate ISPs to offer free or low-cost net access:

https://www.highspeedinternet.com/resources/how-can-i-get-free-internet

Schools don't choose to send kids home. It is usually a government mandate or a lack of teachers. Most schools have never had a budget to kit kids up with personal tech. Most teachers/academics are aware of how much of an educational disaster virtual learning has been and want a return to the classroom.

The best educational authorities can do is supply a printed workbook for the kids and a teacher's book for the parents. AV material (also e-books and question papers) can also be supplied on memory cards, which would not require a net connection.

You don't need the latest kit either. Any old laptop with a media player, Acrobat Reader and LibreOffice would do. Teachers can also chat to kids on a telephone landline.

It is possible to supply an entire syllabus on memory card. This is a good way of delivering educational aid to countries that need it. It's not ideal, but it works. One syllabus will usually do for all kids in any nation. Some courses are nation-specific, so would need adaptation (and translation).

I guess the educational publishers would oppose this, but there is nothing stopping NGOs producing material such as this for developing countries, or for first world nations under lockdown.

Technology doesn't discriminate per se, but you have to consider how to use it in a way that doesn't unfairly impact on those with limited resources.

Low income people get internet for $10/month.

The schools here provide chromebooks to all students, regardless of income.

Chromebooks can be bought for under $100/ea.

If you want to try one out, they can be found used for $75 online.

Our schools are technology challenged if they don't use chromebooks. Then the "haves" get a leg up on the "have nots", because the schools will require Win11 + MS-Office 365 (really Office 340 after outages), because that's what the teachers know.

We tried to get our schools to switch to a lite Linux desktop OS which could be booted from a flash drive on any computer made in the last 10 yrs, but the school board didn't like it because their brother-in-law had the current contract to provide MSFT support to for the school district and using open standards software wouldn't let them charge high rates for MSFT servers and supporting for those systems. Graft everywhere.

The chromebooks removes the school IT from everything and becomes a $10/student cost paid to google that the board of ed. understands.

Of course, there is addition cost to using google stuff - privacy. Google harvests information about the students before it is legal. Then they claim they didn't know and they will stop. By that point, they have a profile on the 120K students in the county.