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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.

5 of 174 comments (clear)

  1. Your Tax Dolars at Work by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    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?

  2. Laptops? What about PDA's? by precize · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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
  3. Re:(OT)Slashdot's db server is acting wonky by Phroggy · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I wish they'd put an automated notice about that. I noticed the problem, but confirmation would have made me feel better - just below "Stuff that matters" and above the first article would be fine. I'm assuming the Slashcode has some way to tell when the DB is broke?

    Wasn't one of the new features that we can create our own threads or something to discuss this? How do you do that?

    --
    $x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
    $x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
  4. My school... by V50 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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...

  5. A few more minutes, a few more negatives. by Apuleius · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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?