Your message is accurate, but your delivery almost guarantees you will be ignored. There really is no reason to be rude... To the OP, you really should be looking at Moodle, or some other Learning Management System. It's not just about the grades, but modernizing how we educate. Keep in mind this is likely a radical shift for your district, but push for it anyway.

Now, imagine you're working on the site of a ~5000 year old camp. The only materiel you can find to help piece together some understanding of the people who lived there is stone, and some smudges in the dirt. Yes, I was once a field archaeologist, and know first hand how durable some media is over time. We've lost countless bits of photographic evidence to time as well, and will continue to do so. Digital media has yet to exist long enough to see if the picture you paint is accurate, as I could recover ZIP media before the day was out ;-) Look at it another way - you are sifting through the contents of your grandmother's home, six months after the flood, and find several USB drives in the drawer above the mush that was her photo albums....

Actually, I lost my 5 1/4 floppy drive to someone who "borrowed" it to recover ~20 year old data. But, as you point out, I am a geek ;-) From a user perspective this may seem difficult, but from a business perspective, it happens all the time (how else can we account for the current use of COBOL?!?) Admittedly, many business interests just migrate old data to new media, but it's not uncommon to need access to data recorded decades ago on a medium otherwise forgotten. All this aside, my re-direction of the question was deliberate, and your answer is, "Paper hard-copy." There are other answers, including moving it from one medium to the next as they become available/common, and there is validity in using more than one of these as a hedge, but the debate should be which is most viable. In the end, however, I will certainly not miss the tons of paper digital media replaces, during the next move!

I can't see the point of this. People no longer keep horses for transportation, we hardly write things down (I've seen graduate research indicating handwriting is ceasing to be relevant), even our books are moving to digital. The proper question would be, "What is the most reliable storage medium for my digital photographs, assuming I need to access them in twenty years?"

Interesting argument, but I still disagree. Being purchased by Blackboard does not prevent those previously contributing to the code base from continuing to do so. Additionally, talent moves into/ leaves open source projects regardless, and Moodle is certainly large enough to draw new talent in on its own. Again, it's an opportunity. In an absolute worst case scenario, Blackboard further enhances their bleak reputation, while Moodle remains the same.

So, Blackboard acquired some firms supporting open source LMS. At most, they've inconvenienced the folks who have been using the services of the firms they purchased with needing to find new support. At least, they've acquired some new potential profit centers. And, if they do a poor job of managing them, or deliberately kill them, they will have succeeded in creating an opening for new firms supporting LMS. They can't impact the code or the knowledge base, and those people currently working for those firms always have the option of working elsewhere, like new start-ups. Come on people, a huge percentage of us got into this business, at least in part, because we didn't like how someone else was doing it, and knew we could do better ourselves. This is just another one of those opportunities ;-)

This is no different from the music and movie industries, an industry desperately clinging to a business model which has become obsolete. It's all about entertainment and control - consumers who wish to be entertained, and those who wish to control how this happens and turn a profit. The consumers have taken to the electronic/digital world and found great entertainment, they will not change back, and anyone who thinks otherwise best go feed their horses and quit worrying about petrol prices. Unfortunately, the industries in question made so much money in the past they have enough to bleed a while longer before dying, and annoying everyone else in the process. John Q. Consumer doesn't need to buy a bit of plastic to enjoy his music, is quite content watching streaming content on a small screen rather than a huge one in a theatre, and generally enjoys carrying his library with him in a small device, rather than the massive pounds of paper formerly required. The first person to come up with the business model utilizing these to turn a profit wins. Oh wait, how much content did Apple sell last week?

Out in the shop there's an old fixed-head HD from a DEC accounting machine. It's a ~10" platter driven by a GE motor roughly the size of your fist. I don't remember how many heads are on it. I've never attempted to power it, but keep it as a historical item, a-la whence we came. I'm guessing this thing came from the early '70s...

I work for a K-12 public school system... and most of the passwords I see like this *are* [lastname][current year], or something equally guessable. Oh, and these are the faculty. I really want to send out an email at the beginning of every school year; "All faculty should make three copies each of their house and car keys, and attach them to 3"x5" index cards containing the address/license # and description of each property. Please have these delivered to the Technology Department as soon as possible, so we may have them distributed randomly about our schools when the students arrive to begin this year. If you take exception to this, please consider how we feel about your doing the same with our keys, the ones we call passwords." Think anyone would read it? No more than they do those annoying boxes which pop up asking for credentials...

Dude, I've watched so many OS X users click through *anything* that pops up to know better. That "average" user everyone keeps referencing doesn't read those boxes any more than they read the EULAs for the software they're using, and most of them will provide credentials without even considering why they might be asked for them. Users view all of this as speed bumps, and don't have any idea it's part of system security. Come on, how many passwords do you still see pasted on monitors, or sticky's on the desktop?

Stop and consider how many of these posters would have to look up the word 'pedagogy', before they could respond to my saying they have no understanding of it. Consider it this way - what merit would you give a K-12 teacher, criticizing your coding techniques? Most to the geeks here know no more about early childhood development or classroom management than the teacher would about object oriented programming. The biggest difference is most teachers wouldn't dream of assessing someone's programming skills, whereas this thread gleefully makes assessments of an instructional method not exposed in the summary. 1) Stop insisting your children live in your remembered childhood world. If this worked, we'd still be drawing on rocks. 2) These students live in a world where this technology is ubiquitous. They learn from their parents, from the time they're born, about cell phones and laptops and game boxes, oh-my, and think no more of them than we do automobiles, these devices just are. What reality is it where you expect them to walk into an educational environment where these are outlawed, in favor of sixty-plus year old methods and tools? 3) Education is an investment in our children. How is it there are no successful enterprises in today's world which do not spend large sums on computing power, yet we expect our children to compete while we quibble over the cost of paper? 4) China has more honor students than the USA has students. Be concerned over what they're investing in them. Then consider what we're investing in ours. This is not about devices, it's about education. What's broken isn't just the hardware we're using, but the system stuck in a 1940's mentality. If you change the way you teach, the devices become the tools most of us adults are using them as, and learning benefits enormously. If you just throw equipment into an antiquated system, it's wasted. If all you can do is complain about equipment costs, go tell your boss you're going back to paper, pencil, and the USPS.

As another geek in the trenches, the above poster is correct, and we're doing it. Additionally, most of the "problems" pointed to in this thread don't really exist at any level worth measuring. My district has issued laptops to every student 4-12th grade. Our test scores are now 3rd in the state, while our per-pupil spending is 99th (of 115). It does work, it does bring drop-out rates down, it doesn't have to cost that much, and it can make a difference in education. However, as the poster states, it's not about putting technology in the classroom, but transforming education to teach with technology. In many cases, teaching has become a two-way street, as the students have taught the faculty about the technology. Stop thinking about this from your own perspective, and try seeing it through the eyes of your children. And, just for those of you who can't see past potential distractions, come watch what our first 4th graders do for senior projects in a few years. I watched some of their network traffic as 4th graders, and I guarantee the future will be amazing.

Um, dude, some of us remember what a 300 baud modem sounds like, and were beside ourselves when we could get a 2400.

I manage a few thousand MacBooks in a school district which issues one to every student, fourth through twelfth grade. Simply put, it's not about the hardware, it's about changing education. If all a district does is provide hardware, without building curriculum to go with it, it *is* throwing money away. On the other hand, if the staff development is there, and the curriculum is brought into the 21st century, it is worth every cent. In fact, my district currently ranks in the bottom twenty percent for per-pupil spending, and in the top ten for performance - we spend less per student than most, with incredible results. Yes, there are distractions, just as students have found distractions throughout history. Yes, there is misuse, just as students have misused every other item they've had available throughout history. In a world driven by computing devices, where the overwhelming majority of students are involved with smart phones, game consoles, digital entertainment (we're a long way from TV), etc., if you believe your child will take an education lacking these tools seriously, you're kidding yourself. I have personally witnessed elementary students (4-6) creating data my generation could not have considered until college. Give students all the tools, the hardware, software, and curriculum, and they will do amazing things.

You mean we were supposed to count? Oh bother...