Good idea.

Amen. Think of airplane mode. Guest device limiting its own lan consumption on all apps with one switch the user can find.

We don't want to setup a ms server with WUS service. May be our only hope. Leaves us no other choice.

Nice. Thanks. Will try.

Our students are all disabled. 50 of them. Many speech and text assist I've apps.

Thanks port 0. I will look in to that. Great reflections . I agree.

We are not incompetent. Even when we load balance with a Cisco dual wan router the updates from devices slam us. Read the many more details I have added.

We don't qualify for e rate as we are private. Non profit for disabled. We shopped but best deal in rural spot is t1 at $600 a month. Netflix tests OK now when no guest devices on our lan. I can't ban win laptops nor ban android phones of staff and students.

Gpedit.MSC works half way. Only on our win 7 pro desktops. Not on guest computers.

Blocking the domains in that KB article Is known to break windows update for us and others on this posting. Then we must re build our master image. Blocking apple iOS has no side effect.

well said Anonymous. Let the students pick the device to read the PDF or content. The content should be universal.

This does seem like a dirty trick to sell iPads. The mini screen is too small if reading lots of text is the goal. The college should have simply given students a mandatory fee and chance to pick from 2 large screen tablets and 2 laptops or prove that you can bring your Own fully compatible device.

The college has a concern and that's validated by the reader comments here. A lot of students try to go the cheap route and avoid full time access to their own book. I've taught community college and by the 3rd week most students with performance problems had limited access to a textbook. Some students can pull off great work without full textbook access, but that is rare.

again, nice point. A key point here is Universal access to content without restrictions on time, location or license. I still have some awesome JSTOR PDF research files in my google drive, because i had rights to keep the paper too. Aaron Swartz RIP. He would love to chime in here.

Promising. Yes. Can the teachers make text assignments engaging? Unknown? I fully agree with the advantages of PDF files in grad school classes. I like Mr. Jellomizer I just did grad school and loved having both printed PDF and PDF files in my google drive. I wish I could have had all 3 on my laptop screen ( and sometimes paper ) My own papers, PDF readings assigned by Professors, and Textbooks used by most similar grad programs. The search feature alone was awesome. My work was done faster and at higher quality than many classmates. My concluding work and thesis was so easy with everything on screen.

I also teach K-12 and I am the IT guy at a school using ipads one-one. We had limited success with textbooks. We have students with disabilities.

Book or ebook? What can improve learning is the way assignments incorporate text.

If a teacher wishes to have 50 pages digested by 50 students have each of 50 students summarize one page and skim 49 pages of text and 49 summaries of fellow students. Give 25 keywords to 50 students and have them read all 50 pages but extract the best quotes related to their keyword. School should not be about reading x number of pages.

Technology is neither sedation nor salvation. That's my thesis title. We've got very little conclusive research about technology in education.

I leave you with a good quote from experts on research of student success in college.
>>>>quote >>>
"the degree of net change that students experience at the various categories of institutions is essentially the same. That is not to say that any one institution resembles any other institution in its power to affect learning. ...

What matters is.....
===================
the nature of the experiences students have after matriculation (admittance) :
the courses (content) they take,
the instructional methods their teachers use,
the interactions they have with their peers and faculty members outside the classroom,
the variety (diversity) of people and ideas they encounter, and
the extent of their active involvement in the academic and social systems of their institutions."
http://books.google.com/books/about/How_College_Affects_Students.html?id=Wn8kAQAAMAAJ

Thanks for posting the link to the LA times. Good data on the dirty secret of Gates and other "rich" folks trying to use money to solve poverty.

"Using the most recent data available, a Times tally showed that hundreds of Gates Foundation investments — totaling at least $8.7 billion, or 41% of its assets, not including U.S. and foreign government securities — have been in companies that countered the foundation's charitable goals or socially concerned philosophy.
This is "the dirty secret" of many large philanthropies, said Paul Hawken, an expert on socially beneficial investing who directs the Natural Capital Institute, an investment research group. "Foundations donate to groups trying to heal the future," Hawken said in an interview, "but with their investments, they steal from the future."

I wanted to validate the claims that Gates is guilty. Gates related money is actually limiting the health of people in nations the West considers poor. If Bill Gates really wanted to save the lives of people in poverty he would agree that patents don't matter for medicine in many situations. It's a myth that progress in medicine depends on putting patents before people. We must allow generic and patent free drugs to reach more people, and it would not cut into the massive profits of the drug company stocks held by the Gates Foundation.

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2003/06/mother-jones-daily-briefing-0?page=3
>> see the reporting by John Litchfield of the London Independent 2003
Litchfield quotes Doctors without borders and notes the lack of affordable generics

>> Read reporter Greg Palast
"let me let you in on a little secret about Bill and Melinda Gates so-called "Foundation." Gate's demi-trillionaire status is based on a nasty little monopoly-protecting trade treaty called "TRIPS" - the Trade-Related Intellectual Property Rights rules of the World Trade Organization. TRIPS gives Gates a hammerlock on computer operating systems worldwide, legally granting him a monopoly that the Robber Barons of yore could only dream of. But TRIPS, the rule which helps Gates rule, also bars African governments from buying AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis medicine at cheap market prices"
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article4103.htm

"The Bush Administration has also prevented a positive resolution to one crucial issue left unresolved at Doha. Currently, TRIPS allows countries to produce generic drugs through compulsory licensing, but requires that such drugs be used predominantly for the country's domestic market. That means that countries cannot export generic products thus produced - even to countries where there are no patents"
http://yaleglobal.yale.edu/vi/node/285

As an English intellectual property and antitrust lawyer I read the piece by David Resnik and Kenneth De Ville (2002) with both interest and surprise. It is startling to suggest that a country with the democratic credentials of the United States should, as a matter of public policy and indeed on apparently "moral" grounds, prefer private monopoly rights to the lives and welfare of its citizens.
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/ajb/summary/v002/2.3smith.html

By pouring most contributions into the fight against such high-profile killers as AIDS, Gates grantees have increased the demand for specially trained, higher-paid clinicians, diverting staff from basic care. The resulting staff shortages have abandoned many children of AIDS survivors to more common killers: birth sepsis, diarrhea and asphyxia.
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-gates16dec16,0,3743924.story