Slashdot Mirror
Laptops in Every Backpack
Scott Sawyer writes: "Check out Wired to see that Maine is going to put a laptop in every 7th graders school bag. I remember when we had to go to another room to work on the Tandy, TRS-80's." We did a story about Laptops in Education a few months ago that had more information about this Maine proposal that's now a reality.
Is it just me or will Susie find HER laptop more aptly applied as a lunch table and a method of inducing a concussion in Billy who put a worm in her sandwich than working out the bugs in her latest Perl script?
There is no way something like this can happen without somebody getting some kickbacks somewhere. I would HATE to be the sap working tech support for those laptops, cuz they are gonna take more abuse than my tighty whities 2 hours after eating taco bell.
...All I can say is that my life is pretty strange...
It's too bad that the story was audio only. some of us may not have sound cards or may be at work where we can't listen to such. Heh.
when i was in middle school my backpack was heavy enough! now they want these kids to carry around an extra 8-12 lb?!
we have to be serious here, would you intrust your 12 your old child with a $3000 wizbang lastest greatest laptop that only weighs 4 pounds or will you give him/her you 3 year old notebook that weighs almost as much as your child?
i'd drop down to a $1300 laptop and most of those also weigh 8 lb! the exception to that rule is the Apple iBook and with one of those suckers then weight starts to become a non-issue, but at 5 lb it is still probably to much.
Don't call me back. Give me a call back. Bye. So yeah. But bye our, well, but alright we are on a shirt this chill.
They'd better be toughbooks or the like, cause they will be broken within a month if they aren't.. I should know, I was in 7th grade not too long ago (7 years), and I know how they treat their backpacks. I'm in college and I broke my LCD screen cause it was in my backpack.. (fell off a bike)
Kenny
Man, this guy has guts. On the other hand, you could call him a PHB too. From an administrative perspective, there's soooo many problems that are going to crop up, they may totally take away any usefulness of this project.
And it's not just going to be the random "I can't open my lab report" type of problem. It's going to be the "I dropped my laptop on the way to school, and it fell apart" type of problem. All of the state.
I'd hate to be the support staff for any school district up in Maine...
You should never take life too seriously - You'll never get out of it alive.
Don't spend money on revmping the curriculum so Physics won't be put after Chemistry (what makes just as much sense as installing XF86 before libc). Don't spend money on getting better teachers (now you can't get an educated person to become a teacher because salaries are beyond "poor" and closer to "insulting"). Don't do anything that forces students to study (it's more important to make them think that they live in a "free country" and have no duties whatsoever). Don't keep companies' interests and religious propaganda out of school. Don't even start a program that empahsized learning of technology (heck, a bunch of high school kids making a beowulf cluster out of old p150's just to find out what those Slashdot trolls are talking about would be better than what kids are learning now). Get a bunch of laptops, pay some Dell, Gateway, Sony or even Compaq a shitload of money, pay Microsoft more money, give laptops to unprepared kids, teach them "technology" like pointing and clicking through menus, and be afraid of those kids actually using those things for something you don't understand. And expect that when kids will finish school they will have detailed knowledge of every button, menu and dialog box of the obsolete by that time version of Microsoft Word.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
In the same vein, I saw this article yesterday about a school in NC that requires students to own a Palm IIIc and a portable keyboard. It certainly saves money to use PDA's instead of laptops, and I thought it was a neat idea.
www.code-fix.com
If they don't get to keep them, then depreciation is such that, well, you might as well give them away anyways after a year or two!
Are they going to be allowed to wipe the harddisk and install some other OS than the preinstalled one? I'm not suggesting that it's a bad thing that some limits are imposed on the use of the product when given away for free, but on the other hand I dislike the idea of monopoly supporting giveaways.
;-)
My little brother is very nearsighted and has such problems with his vision that he was eligble for a laptop to use at school. However, the fact that you get it for free means that you're essentially not allowed to anything with it, but use it for it's intended purposes. (You aren't even allowed to install games, but I don't think my brother minded that rule very much
Laptops in school? Aren't there more efficient things to do with the money, like, paying teachers a bit more, maybe?
I may be wrong, and I kind of hope I am, but this SO sounds like a political trick to make it look like they do something for kids education, instead of REALLY tackling problems...
-- B.
This sig does in fact not have the property it claims not to have.
There are very few comments at this time because Slashdot's database server died right after michael posted this story. When the db server dies, Slashdot switches to the static homepage that Anonymous Coward normally sees, which points to the static pages in /articles/... and all .pl files simply put up the static homepage. Under the old slashcode, you could tell this because "dead db static Slashdot" didn't have any banners. Now sometimes there's a line of text above the banner that pushes the banner down about 30 pixels.
Note: With the removal of the static archives of old Slashdot stories, you can no longer search Slashdot through Google.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Man..I really feel like I missed out. Oh, the mayhem i could have caused with wireless networking, if i were allowed to bring a lappy to all of my classes with me. Diablo during classes (Q3A or counterstrike if it had one of those snazzy mobile GF2's in them), sending provocative messages over the network, completing my homework minutes after it's assigned and selling the answers with paypal over the network..oh, what a glorious time it must be to be a 7th grader.
As it was, i had to settle for flaying the classrooms macintosh computers with ResEdit
The article itself is almost as short as the slashdot article pointing to it. This should be preserved as an endangered species. Hmm, maybe Slashdotius Shortius?
// file: mice.h
#include "frickin_lasers.h"
I'm shocked by the negativity here. You people are supposed to geeks. You're supposed to be the people that are most aware of the fact that by the next generation, computery literacy will rank in importance right up there with literacy itself. The people that know that very soon, it will be incredibly difficult to get any job beyond manual labor if you don't know how to use a computer. It's absolutely shameful that all of the kids I went to school with in high school just last year were wasting their time in two elective classes a day (80 minutes each) and going home to a home without a computer, when knowledge of how to use a computer is becoming one of the most important skills for getting a good job in America. Forget tech support, costs, and other understandably important things. At the very least, a Hell of a lot more of these kids won't be absolutely lost when they sit down at a computer. Better yet, quite a few of these kids that are currently computer illiterate are untapped geeks... a lot of computer illiterate kids could be given their calling in life and the hope of a good, high-paying job through these laptops. I expected more intelligence from the people here. This is one of the few examples of a politician really understanding the importance of computers, and you people are just throwing your usual pessimistic crap at him. This guy now has my respect, and he would have my vote if I were in his state.
Since sex ed classes are too controversial, they'll just let the kids trade cyberporn to learn about the human body.
The guy said it all, go away, nothing to see here.
Are they giving these laptops away, or do they have to be returned at the end of the year? What happens when (and not if) they get lost, broken, or stolen? Who pays for them? Losing a $20 mathbook is one thing, but what about a $1,000 laptop?
-The Tempest
Way back in 7th grade I carried an old Compaq 286 laptop (I think it was an LTE). It had no mouse, a monochrome screen, and pcmcia modem. It was really useful for taking notes since my handwriting was/is atrocious. I believe the software of choice was wordperfect 5.1. While I admit that it was quite beneficial to be able to search through my notes and even format the data for studying, I also used the free time I had to use the modem to dial into various BBSes and play door games. On more than one occasion I was caught when the librarian wanted to know what those "strange tones" were when she picked up the line.
Point being, a 7th grader is just as likely to use the laptop for a game in class instead of proper note taking. In the age of 802.11, it is more likely that there would be more in class chatting via Instant Messenger than legitimate note taking. Of course in-class computing habits will vary with each student so it is very possible that my assumption is completely wrong.
What you fail to realize, is that even if the laptops in question are crappy, obsolete Dell or Gateway junk, they are still COMPUTERS. They can be NETWORKED. Their contents can be UPDATED.
Think about it for a moment. Instead of working from obsolete, dumbed-down hard copy textbooks that have been eviscerated to satisfy the bible-thumpers in texas, kids can work from current material, obtained on line and edited or written by their teacher, or by community volunteers, etc.
School districts will be able to get courses from the net that fit their own ideas of what to teach, not the insipid pablum that the textbook companies have to write.
If you're offended by the idea of those kids working with windoze, then roll up your sleeves, and start putting together a Linux-based courseware package.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
I have to say that the idea is good. In the college I went to, even new pc's (all running wintndo) had to be reinstalled every couple of weeks (of course you can blame part of that on M$). In educational systems, in Belgium, every computer has to run M$ Wintendo. That is because one of our ministers made a deal with beloved Bill Gates (remember the pie in his face)! If you give the students laptops, they are responsible for there own system (and some WILL make it dual boot ;). Only thing is, it is up to the school to take care of the deal between the comany that makes the laptops and students. Not all of us have the money to buy a laptop.
Greetz,
Menteb
At my school, and many others here in Melbourne Australia, the whole student populous has their own personal laptop. In general, there's not a huge benefit. The only class I use it for is Information Systems (for coding in Java - ugh), and occasionally Physics (recording results, drawing graphs).
;)
What can I say about compulsory student-laptop programmes in general? I don't see them as a good thing. I think an optional scheme would be much better, as there are plenty of people who hardly ever use their laptops, or have access to desktop computers at home that are perfectly suitable for what they need to do (write an essay, for example). On top of this many famalies cannot afford to shell out $2-3k for a decent laptop.
At my school they have a deal with a computer supplier which offers a 1 year parts, 3 year labour warranty, plus insurance, plus software at a not-too-unreasonable price. Twice a week or so they send out a technician to service the broken laptops, and we also have about three 'notebook service technicians' that look after staff and student problems. The system, in general, works pretty well.
They have several default install disk images that they stick on every laptop - this consists of Windows 98, drivers, Office 97, and a few curriculum-based software programmes. They don't really care if you install the OS of your choice (I personally run Slackware on mine), as long as you don't get up to any mischief. (In fact, they recently took down the MAC addresses of everyone's network cards due to some ARP spoofing that was going on - little do they realise I'm only an 'ifconfig eth0 hw ether xx:xx...' away from anonymity)
Many posters have commented on the breakability of laptops when put in this kind of environment. In the beginning this was a bit of a problem, but the Toshiba laptops that they reccommend generally serve us pretty well. I've had my 440cdx fall out of my locker a couple of times with the only damage being a cracked case. I'd estimate that, from a student body of 800 or so, only 20 LCDs would be replaced in one year. Not too bad, really.
In any case, it's good to see the Yanks are catching up to where we've been for the past 6 years
It's the ultimate "dog bites man" story. Let's see: Americans are insanely mobile, and yet the country has no national curriculum, so children who move have gaps in what they've learned. Any attempts to write even a skeleton for a national curriculum gets shot down by politics. By the time kids enter kindergarten, they have been driven by television to have the attention span of a horny weasel, making discipline difficult, ever more so because every class will have two or more problem kids who cannot be disciplined without a confrontation with their parents. Another two or more will have been so neglected that the teacher will have to show them how to tie their shoes, use silverware, and sometimes how to brush their teeth. Separating problem children for the benefit of normal kids is too tied up in legalities, so it just doesn't happen. Wellcome to the circus. But hold, there's more.
Teaching doesn't pay well. So few people enter it. Many of these come from the bottom of the collegiate barrel. Ed-school is a joke. Teacher unions worsen the problem by fighting against any attempt to tighten merit requirements in the hiring, tenuring, promotion, or firing of teachers. The only surefire way to fire a teacher is to lay an accusation of pedophilia. In ed-school, teachers learn methods based on the ideology of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and his heirs, which is largely counterproductive. Ironically, ed-schools continue to represent Rousseau's ideas as grand innovation. So the classroom is a lunatic asylum, and the teachers can often be counted among the patients.
First grade reading is hardest hit by ed-school methods, making for a piss-poor start. The impact of "whole-language" teaching has a negative effect on the entire 12 year system. Yet ed-schools stick to these methods because ed-schools are a cult, not a branch of academia. As students progress through the system, they are hit by popular culture and its pernicious influence against making any effort longer than thirty minutes. This same monstrosity also helps create the school clique system, which by high school comes to resemble wartime Beirut, minus the firearms.
And the solution, says the state of Maine, is to give them all laptops. And people wonder why I am renewing my green card, but not filing for naturalization...
well, you would have needed a try to carry a TRS-80, especially because of the monitor...
Progress is a fantastic thing, isn't it? Think at when our grandchildren will be able to fire up their IntelliPrompter(TM), instead than asking Dad to do the homework for them!
ciao,I think it's important to be computer literate but I think at that age alot of time is going to be spent keeping them from playing games during class.
We also have this growing obsession with the internet. Students would be better off reading books, granted some are only available on the net. I hang around Gamedev.net alot and see too often "where can I get a tutorial?" for everything. Sometimes you have to figure things out on your own. You can't learn how to do that if you're constantly hitting Google for the walkthru for the current homework assignment.
In the long run that won't help. Technology changes constantly. I know how to program and build computers because I learned how to experiment and figure things out on my own. As soon as my HP fried I ripped it apart and have built all the computers I have (4 in my room) just by looking at how the HP was assembled years ago. If those students with laptops don't learn how to learn, they'll never move past that laptop.
Tech is nice but school doesn't need it. There's alot to learn in life and technology isn't a significant part of it.
Ben
Work Safe Porn
My school did something like this. They got a deal with IBM to get a whole bunch of ThinPad 365EDs. The result was a complete disaster. Kids were playing catch with them, messing with the BIOS, ripping out huge portions of Windows and other unspeakable things.
Anyways, they have been sitting on a shelf in the library for a few years now. My dad is the auto teacher there and found them and asked if he could borrow them for my brother and I to use. We've had about 6 so far, two had physiclly wreaked hard drives, only one had the port covers still in place, two were missing _many_ drivers, on one someone had gone into the BIOS and disabled the cache, making it unbearably slow. One had Corel Suite 8 (the office app on these things) deleted and most had a few games and stuff installed. None had the PCMCIA modem that might have been there.
So basiclly of these 17,000 Laptops expect about 1,700 of them to be in perfect working order.
Off Topic Finish to my story: I currently have two working ones working: The one I'm writing this on, that I could just bearly get back working under Windows 95 and the other one was missing 3/4 of Windows 95 so I installed Linux on it. Then found out that Linux+X does not like a 486/100 with 12mb of memory as well as I have been told, so I dug out my 386's old copy of MS-DOS 6.22 and Windows 3.1 and installed it. I really wish I could morph them into a G4 Titanium PowerBook though...
America's school textbook system is a racket, and the textbooks suck, not so much because of the religious wars but because it's a damn racket, but the computers don't solve that. It doesn't matter if material is "current." Algebra hasn't changed since I was in school, nor physics, nor history. And you can bet the laptops will be used to look at pablum just as bad as in the textbooks because this does nothing to address the corruption of America's educational-industrial complex.
'nuff said.
1. What do you call a student who knows the
laptops better than the teachers? "Hacker."
Comes to mind. That and zero-tolerance should
make for some interesting war stories in the
letters section of the next 2600 issue.
2. Muggers, burglars, and other scalawags
and vagabonds will be making their way
to Maine some time soon. There is probably
good money to be had from robbing the students.
3. How much class time will be devoted to
waiting for everyone's software to boot up?
When I was in the 7th grade, I had to carry home at least 3-4 books a day. I'd get home, and I'd just drop my books on the floor. Now, if I had a laptop, I'd probably have been a little more careful, but I'm sure one day it would just slip my mind, and the laptop would get broken in half.
The kids need tough laptops, tough laptops are expensive. Most schools are strapped for money as it is, so they're going to go as cheap as possible. The laptops they'll get are going to be the handle with care kind. I predict 80% of them are going to need expensive repairs (or total replacement) by the end of the first semester the kids have them.
A lot of people are being left behind in the computer age because they are old and thus find it hard to learn an entire new vocabulary for dealing with computers. But that is not the problem kids have. Age 18 is not too old to catch this wave. Kids have other disadvantages in need of redress: if they can't write clearly, they come off as idiots in email. If they can't read, they're toast. If they don't have a good base of general knowledge and a good grasp on highbrow (i.e. technical or literate) English, they're toast. Laptops don't solve any of these problems, which means laptops don't close the real digital divide.
Computers for kids, great idea. But now what are all the fearful and anxious adults going to do to control how those computers are used? What are they going to do about the kids who use their computers to trade music, games, and (gasp) porn?
The only thing worse than kids not having access to computers and the information and knowledge they unlock is for that access to be controlled or otherwise abridged, and yes that includes access to things that are sexually explicit. The world would be a much better place if our civilization didn't have this neurotic relationship with sex. Porn is harmless unless it is a person's sole or primary source of information about sex.
Porn is used as the universal excuse for denying access to information. That wouldn't be so bad if it were actually harmful to anyone. The fact that it isn't just makes the lies it is used to defend that much more bitter.
I'm 28 years old by the way.
Lee
Muslim community leaders warn of backlash from tomorrow morning's terrorist attack.
the Governor of Maine is a Machead, those laptops are going to be iBooks and they weigh a paltry 4.9 lbs... still too much weight, you say? nonsense, it builds character! heh
sour grapes! the naysayers only wish they'd have been so lucky... are you a taxpayer in the state of Maine? if not, then don't worry about money spent on these kids!
yes, that is right... the Guv of Maine is a Machead, these laptops will be the rugged, thin, lightweight iBook...
"renewing my green card"... hmm, i'd say that you are damn lucky to have one, and should likely keep your mouth shut about matters that do not concern you as you are not even a naturalised citizen... further, do you live in Maine? do you even have children? one thing's for sure, you are a pompous ass. quantum materiae materietur marmota monax si marmota monax materiam possit materiari?
they will be the lovely and talented iBook laptops, very very quiet indeed.
If perhaps they would have the children _build_ the laptop before they use it, they might actually /.er.
_learn_ something useful. Instead of using it to trade E-Pokemon, or some other rediculous 13yo crap. I'm doubtful that the computers would see more than 40 hours of actual use for homework. Hell if the Government is willing to just hand out laptops to anyone, why not me? I could use a new laptop for sure, just like any other
Schools are becoming nothing more than vocational schools for the tech industry. In the 60's if they would have insisted every kid learn about cars and give cars to ever 16 year old- people would have called such an idea moronic.
But now? I guess since its computers - its cool.
Computers are an interface to information - they are not the information. They are a tool. Not every kid needs to learn the tools of information. Especially if he has nothing to say - as more and more of these kids are going to show.
They spend money on this while they kill music programs around the country. Can't afford new books. Its sad. We will eventually become a nation of high-tech plumbers and carpenters.
Chet
You might know Clifford Stoll, he is famous from the early days of the Internet when he tracked down a computer spy. And he's programming computers since the mid 60s.
But his reasons for keeping computers out of the shools are compelling:
After I read the book, I was convinced, that we should have computers in school, but only where they are really useful. Giving a laptop to every pupil seems much too expensive and the money should better be spent for conventional education (more teachers, better books, better libraries).
Clifford Stoll sometimes sounds too extreme or even fanatic to me, but then he has a lot of facts which prove his ideas. So you might want to read his book or give it to your school :-).
they're thin clients
9th grade would have been good enough.
Many teachers and school people in general are techno-phobic anal-retentive control freaks. (Yes, there are exceptions to the rule, but those are usually good teachers who are still stuck with their hands tied due to a control-freak principal.) They will often have the insane urge to regulate everything, to the extent that some poor kid gets yelled at for changing the background.
If the usage of laptops is at all regulated by the school, it won't help to acheive their computer literacy goals, because the students won't be allowed to experiment and learn and will be held down to the (generally low) level of computer literacy of the adults feeling the need to regulate them.
Forget anything about kids changing the operating system on their computer, they probably wouldn't even be allowed to install any new software. Can you imagine some bright seventh grader getting in trouble for installing a C compiler (or even Visual Basic)? I have not yet met a computer literate child who learned what they know under the paranoid control of the teachers. To really learn, they'd need to experiment, and I don't think there's much chance of a school allowing that.
To improve computer literacy, computers need to go to kids outside of the control of the school. Perhaps it is possible to teach them to act like a monkey pushing buttons (make a word document), but for them to actually learn anything they need to experiment and play. Due to the authoritarian nature of schools, the only place for this is outside of school.
______________________________________
Ever notice how fast Windows runs? Neither did I...
Nice to see that they're not going to be spending too much on this stuff. It'd be really easy to spend money on capabilities which would never be used.
I wonder though, if teachers will know what to do with this, if they will have net access easily available on these bastards (ethernet or some type of wireless lan in school, free dial-up from outside), and if these machines are going to be some kind of "information appliance"...perhaps hackable by you slashdot types but NOT by a 7th grader, or whether the intrepid could really do anything with them.
I go to a school where everyone grades 6-12 gets a laptop. It is a very successful program. People are actually learning computer skills, although it takes forever to teach them not to say, "The Internet is broken."
The only downside to the program, is that we are supposedly the most technologically integrated school in the state of Illinois, except there are ZERO computer classes.
Ya, but will they be able to play Hammurabi?
OMG, Those poor, poor, tech support bastards.
I think I'd commit suicide if I were told I had to support 17,000 7th graders with laptops.
On the other hand..... They're probably more cluefull than the marketeers I support now.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I believe the computers-in-schools thing is over-rated. I don't think their cost warrents their use in education beyond actual teaching of how to use a computer, and as a means to research in libraries. Teachers don't understand them, and what do students actually learn or gain from having them?
Giving a laptop to every child is pretty expensive, I am sure there are better uses to be done with the money than spending it on an oversized typewriter. Besides, if Maine is anywhere as socially dysfunctional as where I live, 1 in 3 students is likely to have their laptop smashed either intentionally or through carelessness within 6 months.
"Sorry, but (IMHO) better teachers teach for the love of teaching, or perhaps for the enjoyment of being in control of what gets put in kids minds today.
Poor teachers teach for the money. "
Two things:
Yes, teachers teach for the love of teaching, ideally. However, ideology is boolean, not scalar. It's not like there are people who live for an idea and people who don't. And nobody lives their life entirely on ideology.
In order for a person to decide to spend their life in a field (teaching), there must also be comfort and respect involved. Currently, teaching anywhere outside a privite college lacks both, so the only people who teach outside private colleges are the educated people who are either very ideological and selfless (good for them, but there aren't many of 'em), those who have somehow managed to be affluent and/or respected through other means, and those who had to turn to teaching because they were unable to achieve a more affluent and respectable job. That third kind is the vast majority. Some of them just got screwed by the system, but waaaaaay more than any of us want to see are the kind who just aren't smart enough, or who are closed-minded.
And all of this can be fixed by paying teachers more. If teachers are respected and well-paid, it'll be mroe competitive, and better teachers will get hired. Perhaps it'll happen slowly, But it'll happen. Money will make teachers affluent, and in the United States of America, there is little that's more respected than riches. Yeah, yeah, I think respecting money is bullshit, too, but that's the way this country works.
Also, once we've got retards out of the school system, it's a fair expectation that the intelligent, professional teachers we end up with will be decent enough to get rid of the chaff you mentioned, without being forced to do so when their funding is cut off. Maybe we can even hire teachers who are smart enough to decide what the students learn, without relying on elected school boards consisting of people who don't know jack about how the human mind learns.
My sincerest apologies to you people who aren't in the United States and think I'm insulting you by talking about the US without mentioning your country. The United States, oddly enough, is more important to me than any other country, because I'm stuck here.
Errr - it feels like I ranted a little, too - sorry.
Cheers
PUBLIC SPLIT ON WHETHER BUSH IS A DIVIDER -CNN scrolling banner, 10/15/2004
hate to deal with jerkoff wireless freaks who
want laptops on every desk? become a member of
the blue collar k-12 support community..
You want my resignation? force me to work with
a bunch of kids who have the latest and greatest
warez on their shiny laptops trying to break
my proxy so they can use AIM..
I can hear it now " This laptop is private
property-you can't touch it...", then "My laptop
won't boot, you have got to fix it..."
..not to mention the freelance skanks who want
to cruise on the T1 from the school parking lot...
I expect a few months after these come out we'll start seeing /. stories by seventh graders about how to hack them to connect to non school computers, etc... that could be interesting ^_^
8th graders in maine will intentionally bomb their tests so they can get left back and score a free laptop :)
This kind of program looks real nice in the press, but I'll be willing to bet no thought has been given to what will happen once these kids have a laptop in their hands. I work as a technician for a school district in a state where our governor thought it would be a good idea to do the same thing this year, plus give a well deserved raise to the teachers. It was a grand press event, but here were our pitfalls:
1. Abuse. A school is one of the only environments in the world where your users are also actively trying to destroy the computers. Everyone forgets that one, but remember, the same kids that were carving their names on desks and slamming their peers into lockers, are now trying to pry the keys of keyboards to spell curse words. Not to mention the "leet script kiddie" set who are trying to prove how awesome they are.
2. Support. I'll wager that it'll fall on the schools/districts/whatever to keep these laptops up and working. 17,000 laptops, let's say one technician per 500 laptops, that'll be 34 Technicians needed this year. He's planning on doing this every year until these kids become seniors. That's 204 Techs over the next 6 years. In our state, for a non-college grad w/experience, a tech can only expect to make $22,000/yr. That's $748,000 for new techs this year. and in 6 years it'll be $4,488,000 for 204 techs.
3. Networking/Software. One of the first things people cry when they get a new computer is "when can I get on the internet?" I would assume these schools are gonna have to get wireless networking. If not, then what? Next, did they include a copy of Office on every PC? or Works? or Star Office (hopefully)?
4. Teacher Training. They're spending $1 mil. on training according to the article. So let's drum up some numbers 17,000 students / 30 per classroom leaves about 566 Teachers. Now most teacher training occurs after school hours, so imagine spending 8 solid hours with 30 7th graders, then having to spend another couple in a class that you weren't really enthused about to begin with. Also, most likely they won't get to actually implement what they learned for at least 3 months (can't train in summer, b/c teachers are off contract then, and they'd have to be paid to come). By not using that training quickly, they'll start to lose it.
5. Curriculum. I've seen teachers with only one pc in the classroom and turn that one PC into a wonderful teaching experience. But I've seen these same teachers frustrated beyond belief, because the day they had an entire class period planned around using the computer, it broke, or the network was down, or whatever. What happens when they plan a class activity, and one student has a broken laptop, another left his home, and a third student had it stolen? I'll wager there's no replacements, or loaners being budgeted for. Likewise I've seen teachers with an entire lab full of brand new computers, which were turned into garbage within a year, b/c the teacher didn't know (or care) about teaching with them, and didn't keep an eye on the kids. I've seen PC's given to kids as a "reward" for sitting through a class. At this point they become overpriced gaming consoles, because the teachers never implemented them in class correctly.
Bottom line, it looks good in an election, and it's a great way for a governor to reward his supporters once it's over (big contracts for lots of PC's). But on the whole, the headaches can easily outway the gain here. And since I'm griping, I'd tell you how I'd fix it. I'd give a laptop to every teacher with a TV out, or TV converter, whatever is needed. Then I'd set up a number of labs on a campus, in proportion to the number of students on that campus. A teacher who is going to integrate technology in the curriculum can, with those tools, and one who doesn't care won't cause much trouble in the process. But new labs mean more room, and more room means new buildings, which means more money. And who's gonna be proud of a governor who promises "A laptop for every teacher, and you kids go share a lab?"
My $0.02
On the off chance you don't have a soundcard, or are too lazy to listen to a 17 minute interview (of which, truth be told, only the first 10 min. or so cover the "laptops for 7th & 8th graders" program) here are some details. Note - these wouldn't be typical, off the shelf laptops - he's got a special 'new' beast in mind for the great state of Maine.
Gov. King is asking for "Smart Client" laptops - which as of today don't exist. They're putting out RFP soon to see what various companies are willing/able to build. So what is a Smart Client laptop? No hard disk. No floppy/CD. Programs are stored via a 'flash memory' system which will be upgradable from the network. An example he gives of what this would be capable of: students can take the computers home and type a paper with a flashed-down version of a word processor, then upload it once returning to school. He's hoping they can be bought en masse for about $500/machine. No word on what sort of applications/OS they'd be built on, but one can presume our good friends in Redmond will offer WinCE or some such beast.
I suppose you could think of it as being an X-client when at school, yet capable of functioning as a somewhat limited stand-alone machine if disconnected from the network.
Assuming it worked, this would eliminate support hassles (oops, I deleted gui32.dll . . . ) and rampant mp3/p0rn/warez/etc trading during 3rd period Social Studies. It might also make them slightly more rugged - although the LCD screen is still probably the most fragile part of the machine.
Try any pawn shop in New England about 2 months from now. If 7th-graders in Maine are anything like they are in Seattle, half the laptops will be stolen by the end of September.
My old middle school tried implementing a program like this one time. Several friends' younger brothers had to suffer through the implementation.
There are some notable problems:
1) Education is free. If you require everyone to have a laptop, education is no longer free. Here you either force poorer students (and their families) to spend money they can't afford to spend, or you pay for the laptops and spend a million bucks (literally 1000 dollar laptops times 1000 students.........).
2) Electricity and wiring. When my old school tried this, they noticed that schools weren't built with the purpose of having 1000 laptops simultaneously powered. Putting an extra 40 outlets in every classroom not only adds a lot of wiring, fire hazards, etc., but it uses a lot (A LOT) or extra electricity.
3) Attention span. Since I was once an adolescent myself, I'd like to point out that Quake 3 is much more exciting than the endocrine system, and a computer makes losing focus EXTREMELY easy.
Just my two cents
And how much is this going to cost the tax payer??
This is a dumb idea. What will the school board do when the laptops become outdated, and something new is out and better? This will work only if they run linux or some other *nix on those laptops where advanced hardware isn't and issue.
I never really explained why I left teaching in Northern Maine, so here goes.
After teaching science for 11 years in an Aroostook County High School, I came to the conclusion that I did not want my kids going to that school. My son wasted 2 years in middle school being taught by teachers who thought that reading to them for 30-60 minutes every day was appropriate and that covering 1/2 of the book was ok. The administration was clueless (and basically didn't care), but very good at getting grants to pay for their pet projects. So every 2 years there was another bandwagon to jump on, this year I guess it's laptops. One year the superintendent hired a consultant to document our curriculm and write it the flowery prose required to get the next grant.
Do you really think that these teachers will know what to do with those computers? That school already has more computers than it knows what to do with. They wrote a grant to get them (no surprise there) and they teach keyboarding and use them for word processing (and maybe printing, if the kids haven't hacked the printer and changed the Window settings). Does each kid need a laptop for that?
No, I wasn't part of the problem. I do have a Ph.D and moved to your (adopted) state to give my kids a safe place to grow up and for my wife (who is from there) a chance to be closer to her family. Money was never really the issue though since I have left teaching, I'm making 2X what you consider appropriate. Paying teachers more won't improve existing teachers, it will just make them higher paid.
So now you want to give out laptops so the kids will be computer literate. Do you really have a clue as to what computer literate means? Laptops won't solve that problem. All you'll be doing is letting the kids print out nicely formatted text. You need to focus on what the text says, not how it looks.
Sign me,
A former teacher who left the state
I live in Maine. I vote in Maine.
Local teachers and other school officials have been asked to *donate* old laptops (NOT thin clients, NOT PDAs, these are old 486-586ish laptops) to this program. There is _NOT_ money in the budget that has been allocated to buy the machines; there is money set aside for training teachers to reinstall windows 98 and the like.
Angus King is an otherwise excellent governor who is trying to end his second and last term as Governor with a whiz-bang techno-thing.
I wish that people would sometimes check into actual facts before writing them up for Wired and then perverting the facts once more for Slashdot.
I did however, get a big laugh the year it was implemented when I picked up a copy of the school paper. The cover story was about the new laptop initialitive and featured a picture (from behind) of a student in class during a lecture...playing solitaire.
$12,000,000 so students can goof off and ignore the lectures. Way to go, guys. I'm sure 12 year olds will be so much more responsible than 18 year olds.
That's blatantly discriminatory, taking everyone's tax money and only benefiting those who chose to give their children to the state to be indocri^H^H^H^H^H^Heducated. Don't give me any bull about separation of church and state -- they're giving the computers to the kids, not the schools. They're discriminating against the kids.
Can't afford it if they tried to give them to all the taxpayers' children? Consider that they couldn't afford to open their doors if all privately, parochially, and home schooled kids showed up on the first day of public school this year. In spite of the fact that all those kids' folks are paying the taxes for those schools.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
There is absolutely no question in my mind that 7th graders cannot handle laptops appropriately. I speak from disgusted personal experience here.
Over the last two years, my former high school changed dramatically, and what once was a fine, laid back academic environment I was happy in and excelled in, became much worse for the wear, IMNSHO. Junior year we received the curse of poorly implemented Block scheduling and the following year Apple iBooks were provided for every student in grades 9-12, along with AirPort wireless networking.
Now, the admin did not even think of the effect of instant messaging progs beforehand, and within a week we were rolling strong and chatting whenever we could basically. This caused stress between the students and teachers. Most teachers, of course, didn't really need the laptops for much at all. I recall a couple PowerPoint presentations, some web research in history class and obviously typing up papers. But what a fucking hassle. There were a myriad of rules constructed around everything which obliterated personal privacy, (and the right to encrypt my Word files) of course. The admin decided that, rather than laying out our rights, they would just sort of hold all the students in fear of being busted for online activities by etherpeek (a packet-sniffer prog) They quickly banned games and recreational use of the CD-ROM drive. Now, how the HELL are you supposed to enforce that? Additionally, without ANY kind of discussion (for there was little all year, except when I was getting chewed out in the principal's office) Napster was outright censored, and the administration maintained a shield of protective ambiguity about what they were monitoring. Speaking of privacy, one time the backup server's permissions got blown apart and everyone could quickly grab other people's files. And also there was the time when I discovered the functionality of packet sniffing over 802.11 wireless networks. That was interesting. I wanted to sort of alert the admins to it, but they were having such fun with kill-the-messenger tactics.
Simultaneously, dozens of kids (invariably boys) Got Busted for playing games. And a huge swath of the boys had pr0n on their computers. And about 15 screens got smashed.
Over the course of the year, I got very angry and depressed at the whole situation. (additionally at this school I was the only Linux/Free Speech/anti-DMCA person present) One day after we found out that an exchange student we all liked had secretly been zapped back to Belarus over break, we exploded with anger. I made a personal attack on the Assistant Principal and got suspended. When a friend reported what I said on HIS web site, he got suspended too.
Later that year we named out Physics balsa wood bridge "Suspension Bridge," which felt good.
This ridiculous project did little but waste time and money, add stress and make my senior year fucking suck. I apologize for the rant, and I take Paxil now, thankyouverymuch.
--hongpong.com
No 7 year old needs a laptop, NOT ONE. Ten years down the road, when this kid goes to college, he will probably need a laptop to accomodate his cramped dorm room and mobile lifestyle (i.e. studying in the library when his roommate has stunk up the entire floor with his hangover vomit). Elementary school kids need to focus on studying fundamentals like the multiplication table rather than screwing around with thinkum-dinkum's that can do advanced calculus far better than most 40 year old's rusty brains.
I don't think 5th grade teachers will be mandating their students to buy TI-83 graphing calculators any time soon. The reason is simple: they haven't reached that level of expertise with the subject (in this case math) or possess enough maturity or responsibility to take care of such an expensive item. There is no need for any type/brand/speed/variety of laptop in grade school. What the hell are these people thinking?
There is one private prep high school in my city that requires all its students to purchase laptops. Frankly, I don't see the reason behind it. I never needed a laptop in high school either, and look, I performed fine, and I'm going to a college rated one of the top in the country. People need to realize that it isn't the tools that make the results or grades or products. Computers, PC's, laptops, whatever, are merely tools with which to work and create. And WHO does all the working and creating?
I don't know. Maybe I'm all wrong about this. Whatever, spoil those little kids with distractions and luxuries. "Do what you want, but don't do it around me..."
*Simplicity is Elegance* http://icow.com/anata/
I'm the tech coordinator for a Maine school district. The governor's proposal to put a "laptop" in the hands of every 7th and 8th grader in Maine is based on the worst lies that government perpetrates. First, this is about a legacy for a man in the grips of unbridled hubris, Governor Angus King. There is no relationship to the needs of kids in Maine. Governor King sold this idea on the basis of a gift of wireless iBooks ($1400 ea) to one Maine school district by a large paper company. He proposes to distribute a $450 wireless internet device to all teachers and students in grades 7 & 8 but promotes this one site with real computers as is "project". Many (probably most) tech coordinators don't want these. They'd rather have fewer full featured real laptops that would give access to our students. Maine is about to adopt a one-size-fits-all solution to every school district regardless of their plans or needs.
I thought everybody already has a "laptop" form the moment they're born. When I set down, my "laptop" is ready to go.
Or do you mean laptop computer?
Why do you think geeks ARE geeks? Is it because they had some clueless bureaucrat shove a computer in their face and pretend that it would help them learn? I opine that geeks are driven by, among other things, a passion for technology. Along side this is an inclination to experiment, and to learn from the results. I don't think any amount of education, with or without a laptop, can instill this passion if it's not already there.
Now thousands more of our tax dollars per student are going to go toward technology that 99% of the teachers are completely unable to use in any effective way to teach them, and even more of the student's educational time will be spent not learning the basic skills necessary to get and hold a beginning job.
Hurry up and build a stardrive, NASA, so I can get the fuck off this rock.
keep this in mind the next time some reactionary wingnut rants about taxes being too high.
Perhaps input from a teacher is applicable to this topic. Computers are a tool. No different from paper, pencil or book. What is produced should be the focus of our taxpayers' money, not which tools we use.
If Johnny can't read, how will Windows help him? This same dilemma has been glazed over by politician after politician as the candidates grasp straws of the newest fad to get (re)elected. These people are not educators, they do not have a tendency to listen to those of us who are, and they do not understand the needs of the student population. (I am sure you understand this as most politicians understand even less about technology than they do about 16 year-olds)
We are failed time and time again. Our children are failed. We need not computers. We need human beings with the training and time to educate and listen.
Secondary rant: We are raising a generation of people who rely on information given to them via spell check and any moron's web site more than their own judgment, experience and ability. I am constantly amazed at how often my students will blindly trust spell check or will cite information from unverifiable sources whose cites disappear as quickly as their credibility.
Students do not need laptops. They need bullshit detectors, research skills, self confidence, imagination, and the ability to fuck up on their own so that they learn from their mistakes. The student who turned in the downloaded copy of a paper on Huck Finn didn't get to enjoy the wonderful characters created by Mark Twain, has no clue what local color is and isn't even bright enough to revamp his plagiarism so that I can't catch him in the act.
For the students' sake Maine should have spent its money on textbooks and support staff (teacher's aides, reading specialists, mentors, etc.).
*** Sigs are a stupid waste of bandwidth.
This doesn't seem like a very good idea to me... how might these kids treat the laptops? What happens when they break or some kid gets it infected with a nasty virus?
scars are souveniers you never lose.
Having recently been in pubic schools, This sounds like a bad idea. I was in a number of school districts across the country, and this is my take.
When I was in 9th grade, I was in history class doing "reasearch" on the 19th century america. We had a VERY restriced list of sites that we were to go to and a note on the board, also stated by the teacher, that if we went to any unrelated <b>sites</b> we were to be sent out of class. Now, Boise has(had?) it's whole school district sharing one 64kBit conenction. I was looking at a website, but it was loading VERY slowly. I opened up the MS Win calculator program to figure out how long the page was going to take to load. She saw it open, and sent me out of class. That's stupid because it's not a website as had been stated, and because it may not be directly related, but it's not malicous on any level.
In Florida, they let you check a laptop out of the library to do essays and such on. One day, the kid on the bus next to me had one. I knew him so I took a look at it. It was an old system, a 386 or 486, running windows 3.1. It had no non-school software on it, and it didn't allow access to the controll pannel or other such things. It had "Foolproof" running on it. It did prevent you from messing with too much while in windows, and didn't let you boot to dos, but all I needed to do was crash windows to get to dos. Needless to say that wasn't exactly hard to do, especially with their "special" drivers. I got a dos prompt that gave limited ablilities. Given a floppy disk, I could have "fixed the system." I was able to figure out the basic limitations of the system and get the prompt in about 5 minutes, then the guy had to get off the bus.
The advanced technoligy teacher (not the CS teacher) was pretty much incompetant. He did know some stuff, but was a burn out. He just had students follow exact instructions then he signed them off. He did no real work, as far as we could tell, he was plugging his laptop in to the T1 and was downloading movie clips or something. (No, AFAIK, no pr0n) He brought in a system one day that he was building but he couldn't get the system to work. He had me take a look at it. Quickly I realized that the newest drive was mis-jumpered. I put it as an IDE slave, and it worked fine.
Earlier on in the year, he decided to challange the class on computer terms. He wanted to look smart. He started with "How many bits are in a byte?" I of course answered "8" and he wanted to show superiority. We kept going up until something like the size of a disk. He didn't seem to know that disks have a physical size that is different than their formated size. He also stated that "1.44 Megabyte floppy disks hold 1.2 megabytes of data! Ha!" Because I answered the size they hold as 1.44MB. He got this idea because the video he was about to show us was unclear and he didn't watch closely. One last thing with him, on a test, he defined "Clockspeed" as the speed of a clock, and "Uses 2MB of memory" was a moniter.
In computer science, we had an OK teacher. The language of course is C++. She new (at least some) C++ and was always at least a week ahead of our lesson in the book "C++ how to program" or the AP test specs. In teaching C++, she wasn't familliar with C. She also didn't know about bitwise operators, and didn't know the difference between stderr and stdout. (Or for C++ people cout and cerr.) Granted *shutter* we were learning on System 8.6 iMacs with CodeWarrior, and she used CodeWarrior on her Win98 PC at home. Maybe the cerr stuff is excusable, but should she know about bitwise stuff?
So what then are my concerns? Well, you've got standard staff who are wildly incompantant or scared of the big bad internet. There are the "tech teachers" who are there coaching and trying not to do work. And the programming teachers are there learning the same langauge you are, but at least they know some stuff. With all of this, a good portion of the student body will be able to out do most of their teachers.
And in any event, in 7th grade if I had a lap top, I would have been writing QBasic programs to solve my math homework in class. Heck, maybe I'd have started on a better language and I'd be a better programmer now, who knows. I just don't see the benefits of this, but I do see where it's going to be more headaches and cost for school systems.
--Josh
There are exactly 42,935,718 letter sized sheets in a square mile.
Why not require that they get an embedded handheld device(with mini-keyboard)? You R talking about a savings of 500$ or more, by going with the embedded device!
--Yeah two party system!!\\\**Money4Laws**///
Every kid needs a computer- 7th grade is an excellent time to get one. Here are a few reasons-
- Increased workflow
- Easier administering of tests
- Search and find Internet responses
It is very easy for you dumb bastards to say "Its just a tool, maaan.." The computer is much more than a tool. It is the gateway to any information, and since information can be accessed at lightspeed compared to old paper methods it increases the ability of the child to research and learn as he has so much information at his fingertips [internet]. Yeah, there will be hangups the first few years, but stop being luddites. It will be the standard eventually. Also who said learning computers means not learning other things? Computers are not rocket science. Kids will eventually learn how to use them. Basic system administration are simple tasks that the teacher does not get involved in, the technological janitor of the school will be able to diagnose a basic network issue or system not booting up.
Does advancement scare your slow minds??
BTW, it should be possible to run X on a 486/100; speed is even okay on my 486/66. It's the low-memory that makes it a bit of a challenge. But you should be able to run a lightweight window-manager like BlackBox. Just don't try to install KDE or Gnome!
I am not an advanced computer user, I can't program... etc
but something I have learned over time is how to use a search engine effectively
teachers used to say "look it up in the library/dictionary"... part of that exercise is the practice in accessing information, an important skill... just as useful on a search engine
so even those kids accessing cheat sheets might learn something, even if they hadn't planned on it
Troll: Schools are becoming nothing more than vocational schools for the tech industry. In the 60's if they would have insisted every kid learn about cars and give cars to ever 16 year old- people would have called such an idea moronic.
But now? I guess since its computers - its cool.
Computers are an interface to information - they are not the information. They are a tool. Not every kid needs to learn the tools of information. Especially if he has nothing to say - as more and more of these kids are going to show.
Insightful: They spend money on this while they kill music programs around the country. Can't afford new books. Its sad. We will eventually become a nation of high-tech plumbers and carpenters.