Saturday
Nov012008
Apple Retail Store Field Trip
Saturday, November 1, 2008 at 12:00PM
John Gruber recently condemned Apple's new Retail Store Field Trip program in brief but strong terms:
I don't presume to know what the American experience of mixing commercial organisations and education is like, but I can offer some experience from a British perspective.
The involvement of business and education has become well-established in the UK over the last decade. The supermarket Tesco has had a long running "Computers for Schools" program in which checkout tokens could be collected by parents in exchange for various electronic knick-nacks. The school where I teach has acquired such items as label printers, lowercase keyboards and miniature mice from this system, but nothing particularly valuable.
Nestlé have, through their cereal brands, been running a "Books for Schools" program for a while as well, the idea being much the same as the Tesco arrangements. The supermarket chain Morrison's is cashing in on the current environmental fashions to run a "Let's Grow" program giving schools gardening equipment. Morrisons have gone a step further than Tesco or Nestlé and are providing schools with vinyl banners to hang on the gates proclaiming their participation in Let's Grow.
Apple's Trip
So what happens at an Apple Store Field Trip? We sent one of our classes to the Apple Store last week, and it was generally considered a good trip. There were six machines in the store set aside for the trip and the focus was podcasting. The kids were taken through a start-to-finish recording of their own 'podcast' in GarageBand including using Photo Booth to add chapter artwork and burning the CD in iTunes.
Typically with Apple, the whole thing was well-produced. We were sent pre-printed invitations with the school information and the date and time of the visit. I think we were supposed to send these home to parents but unfortunately these were DHL'ed from Cupertino and arrived on the day of the trip! At the end of the trip each child took home a CD of their finished podcast and a t-shirt with the Field Trip design (the ones you see the kids wearing on the Field Trip page).
The teacher in charge considered that the lesson had been very well designed from an educational perspective and was very appropriate for the age and stage the children were at. I might add that this is in stark contrast to many trips we take where the educational content is poorly designed and presented.
Pernicious? I disagree.
I look at the Apple Store program from several points of view:
Firstly, we're desperate for places to go. In our school the younger children do a trip every Tuesday and, frankly, we start to run out of places to go. I would completely share John's concern if a school were to spend one of possibly only two or three trips a year on a run to the Apple Store.
Is Apple's program any more pernicious than these Tesco and Nestlé programs that we already participate in? I suspect it will have a lot less impact than the Tesco/Nestlé/Morrisons promotions, which run throughout the school year.
A large proportion of the advertised-as-educational trips we go on are honestly terrible (this includes many publicly-funded museums with dedicated educational staff). A total waste of time and money. Apple, at least, have made a decent attempt at doing a good job of the trip.
In the end, is it any different from visiting any privately-held facility in school time? We take trips to the zoo, to the concert halls, farm parks and outdoor activity centres. All of these organisations provide discounted entry to schools, which could be seen as a loss-leader promotion for their respective families to come back again. Of course the Field Trips have a benefit to Apple - Apple isn't a charity - but it provided us with a high quality and low cost afternoon trip that the children thoroughly enjoyed and learned from. I'm OK with that.
[Update: I put this in a comment, but I thought I should pull it up to the main post. Someone asked where the educational aspects were. With reference to the 'first stage' of the Draft Outcomes for Technologies in the new Curriculum for Excellence that's coming in here in Scotland:
I think it’s downright sickening that any school would consider a trip to a retail store as a legitimate field trip. Consumer advertising has no place in education. The fact that the U.S. public education system is in such a sorry state that this is even possible doesn’t mean Apple should encourage it. It’s appalling.
I don't presume to know what the American experience of mixing commercial organisations and education is like, but I can offer some experience from a British perspective.
The involvement of business and education has become well-established in the UK over the last decade. The supermarket Tesco has had a long running "Computers for Schools" program in which checkout tokens could be collected by parents in exchange for various electronic knick-nacks. The school where I teach has acquired such items as label printers, lowercase keyboards and miniature mice from this system, but nothing particularly valuable.
Nestlé have, through their cereal brands, been running a "Books for Schools" program for a while as well, the idea being much the same as the Tesco arrangements. The supermarket chain Morrison's is cashing in on the current environmental fashions to run a "Let's Grow" program giving schools gardening equipment. Morrisons have gone a step further than Tesco or Nestlé and are providing schools with vinyl banners to hang on the gates proclaiming their participation in Let's Grow.
Apple's Trip
So what happens at an Apple Store Field Trip? We sent one of our classes to the Apple Store last week, and it was generally considered a good trip. There were six machines in the store set aside for the trip and the focus was podcasting. The kids were taken through a start-to-finish recording of their own 'podcast' in GarageBand including using Photo Booth to add chapter artwork and burning the CD in iTunes.
Typically with Apple, the whole thing was well-produced. We were sent pre-printed invitations with the school information and the date and time of the visit. I think we were supposed to send these home to parents but unfortunately these were DHL'ed from Cupertino and arrived on the day of the trip! At the end of the trip each child took home a CD of their finished podcast and a t-shirt with the Field Trip design (the ones you see the kids wearing on the Field Trip page).
The teacher in charge considered that the lesson had been very well designed from an educational perspective and was very appropriate for the age and stage the children were at. I might add that this is in stark contrast to many trips we take where the educational content is poorly designed and presented.
Pernicious? I disagree.
I look at the Apple Store program from several points of view:
Firstly, we're desperate for places to go. In our school the younger children do a trip every Tuesday and, frankly, we start to run out of places to go. I would completely share John's concern if a school were to spend one of possibly only two or three trips a year on a run to the Apple Store.
Is Apple's program any more pernicious than these Tesco and Nestlé programs that we already participate in? I suspect it will have a lot less impact than the Tesco/Nestlé/Morrisons promotions, which run throughout the school year.
A large proportion of the advertised-as-educational trips we go on are honestly terrible (this includes many publicly-funded museums with dedicated educational staff). A total waste of time and money. Apple, at least, have made a decent attempt at doing a good job of the trip.
In the end, is it any different from visiting any privately-held facility in school time? We take trips to the zoo, to the concert halls, farm parks and outdoor activity centres. All of these organisations provide discounted entry to schools, which could be seen as a loss-leader promotion for their respective families to come back again. Of course the Field Trips have a benefit to Apple - Apple isn't a charity - but it provided us with a high quality and low cost afternoon trip that the children thoroughly enjoyed and learned from. I'm OK with that.
[Update: I put this in a comment, but I thought I should pull it up to the main post. Someone asked where the educational aspects were. With reference to the 'first stage' of the Draft Outcomes for Technologies in the new Curriculum for Excellence that's coming in here in Scotland:
TCH 110F: "I use different technologies to interact and share experiences, ideas and information with others, and am developing my knowledge and use of safe and acceptable conduct."]
TCH 111G / TCH 212G: "I can create, capture and manipulate sounds, text and images to communicate experiences, ideas and information in creative and engaging ways."
TCH 115K / TCH 216K: "I explore and experiment with the features and functions of computer technology and I can use what I learn to support and enhance my learning in different contexts."
Reader Comments (22)
Perhaps I'm just cynical, but seems like Apple is clearly trying to sell their product(s) to young, impressionable minds and that's neither responsible or appropriate for any business to do. Kids won't just remember that they made a recording, they will remember they did it on an Apple computer. That's kind of insidious, don't you think? When I was a child (cough) we went to farms and learned how to milk cows or visited an assembly plant to learn how cars are made. Mostly we went to museums, aquariums, zoos, plays, etc. Things that expand the mind through art, math and science. I can see how the process of making a playlist, editing it in Garageband, then burning it to CD can encourage creativity and might even spark the mind of the next John Peel, so...
It's obvious that companies don't have to push themselves into the education system.
But this is open and transparent, and very constructive in contrast to the invisible, aggressive backstage lobbying of some other company.
I live in Belgium where even today, official pedagogic experts and education policy makers are getting direct orders from their superiors "not to consider Apple systems" when it comes to educational applications or even personal use, in order to be "compatible" with the future general education platform. Guess where that comes from.
Apple is simply using the (Open Source advocates) "build it and they will come" strategy to make its point.
But still, iMacs and iPods are not going to help the education problems.
I think there's a fairly important difference between Tesco's program and Apple's. Tesco may be exploiting an underfunded school-system for marketing purposes, but their primary target is the parents.
Apple is targeting kids.
@Simon I completely disagree that Tesco is not targeting children. They are targeting the entire school community: children, parents, grandparents, teachers and friends. They are also doing it over a sustained year-long collection drive.
The "Tesco tokens" process sucks up a lot of staff time to administer, finds its way into school newsletters. Their token collection boxes become part of the school furniture and emptying them is a privileged job for a rewarded child.
Morrisons' "Let's Grow" program is literally co-opting the school gates as a free billboard.
@Dan Kletter, I don't see the problem with that. I remember that I used to play Reader Rabbit, Carmen Sandiego and Fun School 4 on an Apple Mavintosh LC when I was 7. It hasn't destroyed my technological abilities. Apple are proud of their computers. So what? It would be just the same if they'd used a PC, except they'd remember that they used Windows (and they probably wouldn't have been able to do it...)
My Dad took my sister and her friend to the Bullring Center Apple Store where they did an iMovie workshop over the summer, and both of them thought it was fantastic. My sister came back really enthusiastic about making videos. I think it's a great program, personally, I'm glad you think so too, Fraser.
So if schools had the budgets for multimedia capable computers software and computer staff, IT people to keep them running, and the talented and capable staff of educators who could put together a lesson plan and teach it to the kids in an engaging way they would do it. But if Apple offers their retail space for just such an event, its evil? Inspiring a young person to see that there are so very many career opportunities that involve the use of a computer for things other than chat and email is in my opinion essential. It is certainly worth the risk that after such an engaging lesson heaven forbid some of them might go out and actually buy one.
It's great to see comments from so many people who haven't participated in the "Field Trip". I was present for one of the sessions at a local Apple Store, and I can honestly say that other than the location and equipment used, there was no real emphasis or pressure on Apple branding. The focus was placed on the content that the kids were creating. Interestingly, many of the students (and teachers) were already Mac users - they even brought in their machines to use on their little projects.
Writing off a corporate sponsored workshop as "tainted" by only reading the webpage is just bad journalism.
I agree with dvsjr - there is great pressure in most education systems to ensure that children learn how to do things using computers. If Apple can offer an environment that is generally superior to all of the schools that I have attended (both as a student and as an IT support professional) and provide a lesson that the teaching staff recognise as worthwhile (Fraser, I would say, is well qualified to make that judgement), then why wouldn't we all encourage such a thing?
Taking kids to any business where they are simply marketed to is clearly wrong. Taking kids to a well-presented location where they get hands-on experience with activities that are widely accepted and promoted in general society qualifies as part of a well-rounded education.
Make sure the teachers are able to spot the difference, able to explain to the students what the difference is, and I think we will all be happier with the education systems in our respective states and countries.
My wife's school has a rather large computer lab that is all Mac. As with your podcasting experience, the students here use it for podcasting, video production (including some award-winning anti-racism stuff), and various other things. I can see this being *very* valuable for a school that doesn't have the same level of computer resources—and perhaps more importantly, computer-literate teaching resources—as my wife's school.
It might perhaps be more valuable if Apple were to set up a roving classroom that does the same thing, but can travel from region to region to help disadvantaged kids.
Eeee, when I were a lad a field trip would be to a place like Slapton Ley where we would do surveys and biological transects. No retail involvement, just facts.
Hey,
Here I think apple is targeting family or parents over here, whereas Tesco is not targeting the same. Very important issue to be sort out/
Thanks,
Peter
A great post but How to select a cool handbags. we sell cheap handbags We are the best store provided various cheap designer handbags but only a little white to make coach handbags online
Cleats are sports footwear that help you preserve harmony. Additionally they enhance your motion. Their designs are made according to the needs of the activity. This indicates that these which can be great for soccer will likely be insufficient for the loubiton. It is, as a result, very critical that you simply make certain the cleats you intend to buy are those created for the sport you intend to use them for.
Several options are open to you personally should you be seeking to purchase new cleats. You can get them generally merchandise shops or specialized shoe shops. You'll be able to also get them online. Nonetheless, a great stage to bear in mind is that they should be the proper size and particularly created for that sport you intend. Please, don't get cleats for an additional sport regardless of how the salesman tries to persuade you they are going to do the job, they won't.
Soccer cleats are distinct from other cleats in that they do not have outsoles. They also do not have mid soles. They're produced of different supplies like leather and polyurethane and may occasionally have aluminum cleat covers or caps. An crucial consideration within the style of a soccer cleat is that it is produced to help keep the player's center of gravity reduced. This guarantees balance. It truly is also built to keep the gamers feet as low to the ground as possible. Should you be a soccer player, you'll concur that this assists your speed and in specific varieties of shots. Finally, soccer cleats have stitches in location of toe cleats as these make for much better control more than the ball.
Insist that smokers use ashtrays. If an individual inside your property smokes tobacco products, or you've got website visitors that do, make sure to set out ashtrays or inquire them to smoke in designated regions (like the front porch). This could support to minimize the risk of an individual spilling cigarette ash around the floor, which could trigger burn off marks.
The standard for baseball cleats isn't as simple as that of soccer. A great deal depends on the individual player's choice as well as the turf they play upon. Some favor much better support around their ankles and so go for higher cleats. Other people choose lower cleats. You'd have to decide which will assist rather than impede your play. A superb rule of thumb is that you simply use steel cleats should you play on challenging surfaces and some thing softer should you play on wellturfed pitch.
We all know football can be a major effect sport. This indicates you will need all the support you'll be able to get. You also will need traction. You will notice that football cleats usually possess a middle toe cleat. They are designed that method to make sure players get excellent traction and are in a position to take off far more easily. Exactly where you play also has to become regarded as when deciding on a football cleat.
There are places and people you are able to get aid from in case you nevertheless do not know which cleat is very best for you. You are able to get aid from a great shop that has experienced salesmen. If their expertise is in question, attempt a great coach. Should you can't get any of those, you certainly can check discussion boards or message boards online which can be dedicated to these sports.
Treadmill walking is one of the simplest ways to get in shape and burn off body fat. In fact, mile for mile, you are able to burn off as numerous calories walking as you'd jogging. Walking can also be one of the best tension relieving workouts and anybody can do it, regardless of fitness degree.
Want to start a treadmill walking program? Here are 5 tips to help you obtain probably the most walking bang for your buck:
<BR>1) Get your arms pumping.
Bring your upper physique into your workout by pumping your arms. That is an simple way to burn up more calories although walking. If you want to tone up and use far more arm muscle throughout your work out, attempt carrying 2 five pound handweights.
Bonus Benefit: pumping your arms propels you forward and helps you move faster which means far more distance covered and a lot more calories burned!
<BR>2) Build in incline intervals.
Walking on an incline is among the fastest ways to drastically skyrocket your calorie burn up. But you do not have to spend your complete workout on an incline. Try building in 30 60 second intervals of incline walking on your treadmill every 5 to 10 minutes.
If you're strolling outside and can't manage your incline, try stopping every few minutes and doing 10 15 squats or lunges to tone your decrease physique.
Bonus Benefit: Building in intervals will also assist your physique continue to burn calories postworkout.
<BR>3) Boost your pace, not your stride
Got short legs? No problem! Instead of increasing your stride (and possibly pulling some thing), enhance the number of steps you consider. This also increases your speed which indicates much more distance covered and far more calories burned.
<BR>4) Invest inside a pair of exceptional walking christian louboutin
Walking in poor footwear can trigger damage to your feet, knees, hips, joints and back. Wear poor footwear and you may possibly not be walking for any long time!
If you want to feel wonderful after a strolling exercise (and be ready for the next one tomorrow), make positive you've got the most effective possible walking louboutin you are able to afford.
Bonus Benefit: A solid pair of strolling shoes can really assist you to lengthen the time which you walk, which again means more calories burned.
<BR>5) Get plenty of time to warm up and stretch to avoid injury.
Walking is among the very best workouts you can do for pressure relief and long term excess fat loss. Nevertheless there's this little factor called shinsplints that can threaten to put you out of strolling commission for a while.
Many walkers and runners struggle with this problem. This constant repetitive flexing from the shin muscle can create soreness when a walker increases their speed or distance.
To help ward off shin splints or other muscle injury, just take plenty of time to warm up before you truly get into your workout.
Also, make certain you stretch. Pointing and flexing your foot helps stretch and build the shin muscle. Ankle rotations also assist with this. Stretching properly will definitely keep you happy and strolling for the long time to come!
<BR>So there you've got it 5 vital walking exercise suggestions. Keep these in thoughts and you happen to be guaranteed to enjoy numerous stressrelieving, fat burning walks!
Walking to work definitely has advantages and disadvantages. But, in my humble opinion, the pros outweigh the cons. For starters, it cuts down on parking and gas costs. Parking can cost numerous hundred dollars a month, particularly if you're working within the big city. With gas prices so high these days, filling up the tank is synonymous with emptying out your wallet. Together, these costs add up to fairly a bit of money.
And how about safety? Highway driving these days can be hazardous to your health. With so numerous cars around the road, auto accidents are bound to happen. Actually, they have grow to be a typical part of our earlymorning and lateafternoon commute. Road rage is actually a major problem. Angry drivers who use their driving anonymity to commit aggressive acts like cutting you off, flipping you the bird, or suddenly speeding past you just to vent their frustrations have turn into ordinary occurrences. A lot of road rage has to do with work anxiety and an improve in traffic. Men and women are working longer hours, spending much more time about the road, and generally having less time to relax and reap the rewards of all their challenging labor. It really is no wonder we are all feeling a little highstrung.
Perhaps you can see why strolling rather than driving work could be a safer option, if you have the choice to do so. In addition, to eliminating your chances of being involved in an auto accident, it also enables you to have some time to chill out both before and after work. It gets your blood going and your oxygen flowing, which helps your physique rid itself of joint and muscle stiffness that comes from sitting at your desk all day. Finally, it saves you a little bit of cash, money with which it is possible to buy a nice pair of walking louboutin shoes. In case you have the opportunity to walk to work, do. You do not need to jump in with both feet. Start off out by strolling just one or two days. See how you feel. Give your physique a chance to adjust to the change. Add a day every two weeks until you might be walking to work everyday.
Some of you definitely have jobs that demand you to dress up. Strolling for two or three miles in high heels, a threepiece suit, or a wool skirt is hardly advisable. If at all doable, save your shower until after you obtain to work. Many office buildings come equipped with showers. If yours does, use it.
If you should walk inside your work clothes, that's okay too. Although not the fashion statement of the year, I recommend wearing a good pair of strolling christian louboutin sale to and through the office. Carry your work footwear in your bag. You might will need to compromise style for comfort a little and select clothes which can be a little far more "suitable" for walking. Try buying fabrics that move with you and that permit your skin to breathe. Remember, this can be your health we are talking about. Try to be as flexible as achievable. Change may possibly feel strange at first, but you'll get used to it should you be consistent.
Keep potential staincausing substances in verify. Do not let the kids paint, glue, or carve hobbies in rooms that have tile flooring. These substances can drip or spill onto the floor, often leaving permanent stains. Set up an area where they can safely work under your watchful eye in another area that doesn't have tile flooring. Or at least cover the floor with newspapers in the area exactly where the kids is going to be working.
so nice site for me! how much important site for us. thanks for your free!!!
WOW! I was also wondering how that was done as I want to cover the fabric with beads. Now I just have to find the kits. Thanks a lot. Kathy
WOW! I was also wondering how that was done as I want to cover the fabric with beads. Now I just have to find the kits. Thanks a lot. Kathy
It is obviously that selling informative products online is perfectly fit to the affiliate marketing business.
I am great to see this blog, I hope many people can research it.
Theres a wonderful half hour video blog called Not Quite Art, available through the itunes store for free, that has an episode featuring all sorts of artistic things in melbourne!
These kind of post are always inspiring and I prefer to read quality content so I happy to find many good point here in the post.
I am so thrilled for having found your site.
Good point. Thank you for sharing.