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Laptops in Every Backpack

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the training-expert-solitaire-players dept.

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.

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  1. Yoink by enneff · · Score: 5, Funny

    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 ;)