My son is about to turn 5 in May, and this means searching out schools and meeting principals. Education is very important to our family, so this is a strong factor in our decision as is quality of the staff, and the control that the school has over the conduct of their students.
As a technology professional I will of course judge the school on their offering in this area as well.
We’ve settled on Karori Normal School and I have to say that even I was impressed with the IT setup at the school. The deputy principal told us that they were an Apple School; in action this means the school is kitted with new iMacs and a considerable number of ‘bookable’ MacBooks. However I’ve found out that being an Apple School means more than this.
Renaissance (the Apple distributor in NZ) runs a well organised Educational Institution sales division named RED. They operate Apple Bus Tours around areas of NZ so that teachers can see other schools that have been setup up as exemplars. Once the tour ends they can discuss what they’ve seen and how they can apply this to their own schools. According to the RED site these tours are booked up months in advance.
Renaissance are now able to focus on the whole Apple/Windows ability of the Mac platform, and use this as a selling point for the TELA programme. This initiative by the Ministry of Education allows teachers to purchase laptops at heavily subsidised prices.
For a parent, it’s fantastic to see a school with modern equipment. Macs weren’t the only computers, I saw a couple of PCs too, but these were in the minority. Initially I thought that children might get confused between using a Mac and using a PC, but going by the experience in my own household, I’m not sure that’s such a big problem.
Well done Apple, and KNS - we’ll see you in May, Wills and I are looking forward to it.
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