My wife has gone back to school after a restful summer off and she was offered (as was every teacher) an iBook with Mac OS X and wireless. She opted not to take one since she’ll be on maternity leave and prefers to keep her grades the old-fashioned way.
I got curious about the details of the program since I hadn’t heard a peep about it in the Macintosh community so I emailed the Paradise Valley Unified School District. I received a quick reply from Jeff Billings, Director of Technology:<blockquote>We roll out a lot of iBooks to teachers. Started our mobility and wireless project about a year and a half ago. We have about 10,000 computers and are 74% Macintosh. All of our teachers are mobile with iBooks/laptops and we’re embracing handheld technologies (Palm and DANA) in a pretty big way. Finally, we’re just now starting our conversion to OSX - the teachers love it.</blockquote>
Okay, so I didn’t find out exactly how many iBooks were distributed and I don’t know exactly how many teachers are in the district. Still, it’s very heartening given the resistance to Apple in the enterprise noted earlier.