Teaching a lesson in competition – Companies help with upgrades, win user loyalty

When the school bell rings later this month at Schaumburg’s Herbert Hoover Elementary School, the hallways will resemble a busy airport terminal as grade schoolers pull rolling backpacks from one classroom to the next.

By Alex L. Goldfayn, Special to the Tribune.

Each 4th, 5th and 6th grader at the school will carry the usual assortment of notebooks, textbooks and writing utensils in their bags. But there will be another item you wouldn’t expect to find in an elementary student’s backpack: an Apple iBook notebook computer.

Schaumburg School District 54 purchased about 2,000 Apple iBooks for its students, which, when combined with a schoolwide wireless network, will turn its 27 elementary and junior high schools into always-on mobile computing learning environments.

"We wanted students to be involved with a laptop like they would previously be involved with paper and pencil," said Lynn Rauch, the district’s superintendent.

Such large-scale tech deployments are part of a growing trend in education. Competing technology companies are helping to upgrade computer labs to on-campus "digital environments" with increasingly inexpensive wireless and mobile technology while striving to place their products in front of school administrators, teachers and, ultimately, students–who have a lifetime of technology purchasing ahead of them.

"It’s about getting student mind-share at an early age," said Dinesh Bahal, director of education solutions for Santa Clara, Calif.-based Sun Microsystems. Added a Sun spokeswoman: "It’s about making technology that students can use throughout their education and, hopefully, throughout their careers."

Today, Microsoft-based personal computers lead the K-12 education market by a wide margin. Microsoft Corp. operating systems reside on about 70 percent of K-12 PCs, while Apple Macintosh computers hold a 28 percent share, according to Denver, Colo.-based Quality Education Data. The remaining computers, about 2 percent, run other operating systems, including versions of Unix and Linux.

Competing for schools

But as academic budgets are squeezed during a down economy, the competition over schools and pupils has becoming more intense–and creative.

Increasingly, technology companies are targeting teachers to reach their students.

"If you lock in the instructor, you lock in the students," said Ray Boggs, analyst at Framingham, Mass.-based IDC.

Apple Computer, for example, distributed 400,000 copies of its Macintosh OS X operating system to K-12 teachers at no cost between October 2002 and March 2003, which, if sold at Apple’s regular education price, amounts to about $28 million worth of software.

Microsoft, Apple, and Raleigh, N.C.-based Red Hat Inc., the leading distributor of the open-source Linux operating system, offer teachers a variety of free service and support services on their products–including Web-based training, curriculum development tools and lesson plans that incorporate each company’s releases.

"Companies are using aggressive bidding and strategic deep discounts, especially in key accounts," Bill Rust, research director at Stamford, Conn.-based Gartner Inc., said in an e-mail. "Value-added incentives [such as] training and extended warranties are also used."

But the giveaways in the education market aren’t limited to teachers.

Sun Microsystems has distributed more than 1 million copies–valued at $29 million–of its open-source StarOffice suite of productivity applications to students and faculty.

"When you have a dominant player [like Microsoft], you have to take radical steps," said Sun’s Bahal.

But as Apple and Microsoft compete over dwindling school budgets, they agree that school technology now stretches far beyond the computer lab, which, they say, enhances nearly every activity that takes place in a school–administration, teaching and, most of all, learning.

Touting wireless networks

"With wireless networks, you don’t even think about getting connected anymore," said Paul Papageorge, senior director of Apple’s K-12 marketing. "You know you’re connected. With technology fully integrated into the classroom, it’s full immersion."

Microsoft is also touting the advantages of on-campus wireless networks coupled with its Tablet PCs running the Windows operating system.

"Let’s say I’m a teacher," said Tim Tiscornia, product manager for Microsoft’s education solutions group. "Today I have a bag full of papers that I carry around and write on with red pen. When I hand the paper back to the student, I don’t have a copy of it."

But if the teacher is equipped with a Tablet PC, Tiscornia said, he or she can receive the completed assignment via e-mail, make written comments using the Tablet’s Digital Ink feature and e-mail it back to the student using the school’s wireless network. And both parties retain a digital copy.

And even with education’s "massive review of spending," Boggs said "pockets of technology purchases are increasing. We’re seeing growth in notebook and wireless network spending while desktop computers are decreasing."

In Schaumburg, 10-year-old Emily Young starts 5th grade this month at Hoover Elementary, and her parents are pleased the school district invested in a laptop for each student.

"She can do her homework anywhere," said Emily’s mom, Margaret. "Even on the soccer field at her brother’s game."

Added Emily’s dad, Tim, "She’s so proud of the fact that she can sit up in her bedroom after dinner and do her homework."

Mac or PC? Schools happy to mix and match

Jim Peterson is in charge of the technology in Bloomington School District 87. That’s 1,600 workstations–1,100 Windows 2000-based PCs and 500 Apple computers running Macintosh OS X–used by 6,000 students.

"It’s not a problem to be one-third Mac and two-thirds PC," he said. "At first there was a lot of concern, but we’ve had no problems."

Peterson runs the back end of his districtwide network with Windows 2000 servers that integrate smoothly with both platforms.

Such multiplatform arrangements are growing increasingly common in schools across the country, with lowered education budgets causing technology upgrades to occur piecemeal.

And the Bloomington schools have not been immune to the spending cuts. Peterson said he used to have between a $60,000 and $130,000 annual budget to train teachers on technology, but this year that development budget has been cut completely.

Which is why he is thrilled with the creative distribution tactics currently being used by Microsoft and Apple in the education market.

The Bloomington School District frequently receives donated computers from companies like State Farm Insurance Co. and Caterpillar Inc.

Peterson estimates that he has about 600 such donated desktop PCs on his network–all of which are eligible for a free operating system from Microsoft under the company’s Fresh Start for Donated Computers program.

"That has saved us about $32,000," Peterson said. "It has been huge, just huge."

And 200 of the district’s teachers took advantage of Apple’s OS X for Teachers program and received free copies of Macintosh OS X along with a training CD–a $14,000 value in total.

In the end, each platform offers a unique set of benefits to teachers and students.

Peterson said his Apple computers are used mostly in elementary schools because of their ease-of-use and in high schools for graphic design and video-editing projects. Microsoft applications are preferred for productivity functions like word processing and spreadsheets.

And while Bloomington District 87 runs on a hard-wired wide-area network, it uses 11 Macintosh Curriculum Mobile Labs, which include 15 Apple iBook laptops each.

"Those wheel into the classroom, we plug a wireless hub into the room, and boom, they’re on," Peterson said. "It doesn’t matter whether you have a PC or Mac on your network anymore. If you have a good infrastructure, you can use anything you want."

— Alex L. Goldfayn

Copyright © 2003, Chicago Tribune

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