From my experience at the school:
General student population: Students prefer Macs
Students who like to game: Prefer Windows
Students who dislike Mac: Prefer Windows. Does not use Linux.
Students who have a PC: Parents purchased laptop for school work
Art Students: Mac
Novice music students: PC & Mac
Experience music students: Mac
When I did an internship with a consulting company back in 2001, a public
school had to purchase $50,000+ worth of MS Office licenses because the
parents felt it was the only tool of the trade. If the students did not
have Office, their basic computing skills would not be adequate for the real
world. Even though the IBM Lotus office suite came free with the computers,
and it could do everything they wanted, they had to purchase the MS Office
software because of parental pressure.
In my viewpoint, digital natives use whatever they can afford.
Brian Lee
Manlius Pebble Hill School
> From: Fred Austin <faustin@theoakwoodschool.org>
> Reply-To: A forum for independent school educators <ISED-L@LISTSERV.SYR.EDU>
> Date: Tue, 14 Apr 2009 10:16:33 -0400
> To: <ISED-L@LISTSERV.SYR.EDU>
> Subject: Re: PC to Mac
>
> It would be quite interesting to see if a pattern or ratio of
> preferences from the student's perspective. I strongly share the
> belief that such preferences are an adult issue (digital immigrants)
> more than the children's view of "this is how you do it on a Mac and
> this is how you do it on a PC". They don't really care. I don't
> recall who originally used that quoted phrase so forgive me for not
> giving due credit.
>
> Nonetheless we are 95% Mac hardware based approaching 100% with 5%
> running both MacOS and XP Pro. Our perspective is from a tech support
> ratio that allows a larger number of laptops:technician to lower TCO.
>
> The hardware of choice is ever evolving and who knows what the next
> ten years will deliver.
>
> Fred Austin
> Technology Director
> The Oakwood School
> Greenville, NC
[ For info on ISED-L see http://www.gds.org/ISED-L ]
Submissions to ISED-L are released under a creative commons, attribution, non-commercial, share-alike license.
RSS Feed, http://listserv.syr.edu/scripts/wa.exe?RSS&L=ISED-L
