Okay, so Apple isn't exactly the darling of education sales that it once was, but it still holds its own; remember how Apple's CFO revealed in his recent Frednote that Apple holds a 16% market share in the nation's schools? That's up a percentage point from last quarter. And if you're just talking about notebooks, Apple's actually in first place with its 30% slice of the pie-- not bad, right? He also mentioned that Apple had been working hard on iBook-for-every-student deals with several schools and districts, and that while few of them would be as big or as attention-grabbing as the Henrico County or State of Maine initiatives, they still represented a hefty chunk of business.

Case in point: the seven schools in Schaumburg, Illinois where all 1700-odd fourth-, fifth-, and sixth-graders will be getting iBooks as part of a program to improve literacy. According to the Schaumberg Review, three of the schools participated in a six-week pilot program last year, which found that when students had iBooks, "achievement improved" and "students who could barely put together a sentence were writing whole paragraphs by the end of the pilot." Since you can't argue with results, the program has launched with seven schools now, seven more will be joining in January, and the rest of the district's schools will climb on a year from now. This is all good stuff. Kudos to Apple for making kid-friendly products that help make learning fun-- and that schools can use without hiring a 50-person IT department to stay on-call 24-7.

Of course, seeing Apple's improving success in education only prompted the Redmond crew to try to take things one step further. About a week ago, the Philadelphia Inquirer profiled an upcoming "$46 million high school dazzling with the latest technology"-- one that'll be built for the Philadelphia School District by Microsoft. It'll be "embedded with wireless, mobile technology" and stocked to the gills with Tablet PCs and "interactive digital textbooks." Despite one district official calling it a "paperless" school, Microsoft has admitted that "paper will always be needed"-- presumably during those times when the whole school is choking on the next Blaster worm. If it happens in winter, here's hoping they use wooden chairs so they'll have something to burn for heat, too.

Wigged out by the idea of a public school constructed entirely as one big commercial for Microsoft? ("Where do you want to go today?" "Uh, to the bathroom. Can I have a pass?") Oh, don't worry: Microsoft will only be involved "in an advisory capacity. We're still running the school," says the district's chief development officer. Riiiiight. You just keep telling yourself that, pal.

So when will we see this monstrosity? "District and Microsoft officials said they could not anticipate how many computers would be installed or describe what a classroom will look like," and apparently this thing is also "yet unnamed" and its location is "not yet chosen"-- yet it's "set to open in Sept. 2006." Better yet, the school district's CEO said that "he hopes to have it ready a year earlier." So let's get this straight: they don't know what it'll look like, what they'll call it, or where they'll put it, but they hope to have it fully functional in less than two years? Wow-- it is a Microsoft product! Maybe by version 3.0 it'll even stop occasionally eating children. Be afraid. Be very afraid.