Chicago Mayor Praises Google For Buying Kids Microsoft Surfaces 137
theodp (442580) writes "Google earned kudos from Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel this week for teaming up with Staples to fund the projects of 367 of the city's 22,519 public school teachers on "begfunding" site DonorsChoose.org. "Everything that you asked for...every project that the teachers put on to help their students learn, exceed and excel here in the city of Chicago, you now have fully funded," Mayor Emanuel said. "Chicago's hardworking public school teachers are doing all that they can-and more-to support their students, but they need more help," said Rob Biederman, head of Chicago Public Affairs at Google. "We jumped at the chance to join with DonorsChoose.org and Staples to make Chicago's local classroom wishes come true." So what kind of dreams did Google make possible? Ironically, a look at Google Chicago's Giving Page shows that the biggest project funded by Google was to outfit a classroom with 32 Microsoft Surface RT tablets for $12,531, or about 6.5% of the $190,091 Google award. Other big ticket projects funded by Google included $5,931 for a personal home biodiesel kit and $5,552 for a marimba (in the middle of the spectrum was $748 for "Mindfulness Education"). In addition to similar "flash-funding" projects in Atlanta (paper towels!) and the Bay Area, Google and DonorsChoose have also teamed up this year to reward teachers with $400,000 for recruiting girls to learn to code (part of Google's $50 million Made With Code initiative) and an unknown amount for AP STEM teachers who passed Google muster (part of Google's $5 million AP STEM Access grant)."
huh (Score:4, Interesting)
The marimba is good .... and maybe the home bio-diesel kit.
And then there's
$400,000 for recruiting girls to learn to code
Because doubling the workforce without doubling the jobs has worked out so great for every other sector of the economy since 1970 or so when it took off.
Visual Studio RT? (Score:4, Interesting)
outfit a classroom with 32 Microsoft Surface RT tablets for $12,531 [...] $400,000 for recruiting girls to learn to code
How do these fit together? Since when were programming tools ported to Windows RT?
do tablets actually help? (Score:4, Interesting)
Last research I heard, a few years back, was that computers in the classroom actually harmed academic performance except in the sole case that the point was to learn about computers, because they were a distraction and also students didn't tend to take longhand notes, which is an important part of learning.
And if the class is a computer class, tablets seem like the worst possible choice.
Re:Just wondering ... (Score:2, Interesting)
Just wondering ... but why didn't public schools need to engage in constant fundraising and beg-a-thons in the good old days, for basics? Governments weren't spending more on them then, proportionately.
We are spending a river now. Where is it going?
Bloated management/admin costs. Just like big bidness....
Re:No wonder MSFT stock is up (Score:1, Interesting)
Obviously you have never used one. I have been in it for 20 years and I have completely switch to a Surface Pro at work and a Surface Pro 3 at home.
At work I have a dock and an external monitor and do everything from running Visual studio to hosting virtual machines in Hyper-V.
Your ignorant opinion aside, the Surface Pro 3 is just a modern computer with a removable keyboard, no more, no less. But when that modern computer is a current generation Core i5 with 8 GB of RAM, I hardly think it should be compared to an 'Internet Terminal'.
Re: Politician thanks company for doing his job (Score:4, Interesting)
Well, then your spouse dosen't know how to account for their time very well.
When I was teaching, I topped out at $52k a year. This was in the midwest, and the top-paid teacher in the district I think made near $60k.
We were required to be in the classroom for 990 hours. IF you just count that, 52,000 / 990 = $52/hr.
But I was required to be in school more than just the kids. This averaged to be 1 hour before they arrived, and 3 after. (4hrs*5days*39weeks) = 780 + 990 = 1770 hours required to be in school. Now, the per-hour figure goes down to just under $30/hr.
Oh, and if I don't get my grading, lesson plans, meetings, and everything else done in those four hours (I rarely did), then I had to do that as well. Lets be really conservative and say that was only 6 hours a week. 6*39 = 2,004 hours. $25/hr.
Oddly enough, ~2000 hours is what an average blue-collar worker gets paid for per year, including vacations. $52k is pretty good, but I was also at top-pay. That is what was worked-up to.
Re:No wonder MSFT stock is up (Score:2, Interesting)
No, the Surface is a very thin and light laptop with a touchscreen and active digitiser. It's meant for people who need to do work, unlike iPads and Androids which are wholly consumer-only devices.
Nice troll though.