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One Desktop per Child - miniPCs for Schools?
gwjenkins asks: "I'm a teacher in charge of IT in a small school. We would like to bust out of the computer lab model but don't want a trolley of laptops wheeled from class to class. I've drooled over wi-fi PDAs but just can't afford a set for class (and the batteries drain too fast). In a classroom, space is at a premium and teachers won't use a technology that takes too long to set up. Most of the time the kids are just researching (Google), or typing (Google Docs), the rest of the time they can go to a lab. I would love to have a desk-based solution. Can you run a wi-fi mini-pc (sitting under the desk) from a 12-volt rechargeable battery (also sitting under the desk) with a 7" LCD (sitting on the desk), that boots from flash card into FireFox? No wires! No setup time! Has anyone done this? How? Alternatively can anyone say why this is silly?"
It's silly because the cost of a battery is more than the cost of running power to each desk. This includes the cost of a laptop (on batteries) over a desktop - if you're going to buy a laptop, you pay a premium for the fact that it's portable, and happens to require a battery to do so. Not to mention, even if you have batteries, you still have to charge them somehow.
And once you run power to every desk, you might as well run ethernet. The cost of a switch and the cable (and the fact that ethernet jacks are not on-board pretty much every motherboard) is still lower than a good quality access point and PCI wireless cards.
So basically you end up with a lab, which, of course, is not portable from classroom to classroom.
$ of Lab in every classroom > $ of laptops on a trolley from classroom-to-classroom > $ single lab shared by every classroom
And anyways, I agree with other posters here for the most part, learning computers is important, but you still have to learn the basics by hand/on paper first. If a generation of kids STARTS learning addition and subtraction using a calculator/computer, I can't imagine what they'll be like later in life, and later when doing real math.
Speak before you think
I want to agree with this, I really do, but things have changed since you and I used computers in school. You're talking about an Apple II, so you've got a few years on me, but I remember having maybe two 286 systems available to a class of 30 students when I was in grade school, and you know what? Some of us grew up to be pretty handy with computers despite that.
The major difference is that back in the days of Apple IIs and 286-en, we were using computers in school to learn about computers. I remember learning DOS commands and doing lines of "asdf jkl; dad sad fad lad" and so on in some curses-style typing tutor. It was all about building skills required to use a computer.
Now, those skills are somewhat of a byproduct. The computer is the tool it's supposed to be, not the subject. Most kids have a computer at home already and are pretty familiar with it's basic usage. The technology now simply enables different methods of learning. You just can't timeshare an outdated piece of junk between 30 kids now.
In "Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure", some douchebag jock dude says "The future...it's...computers..SAN DIMAS HIGH FOOTBALL RULES!". Now, I'm not sure if San Dimas Football's record warrants such a statement, but the future is now, and it *is* computers. However, just knowing the bare minimum (like a grandma who knows how to check her email and nothing else) won't cut it in the workforce. Students need WAY more exposure to using computers for everyday tasks than we ever got timesharing the ugly beige monsters of our day.
What do you think kids of yesteryear did? Sure we had a computer in the classroom. It was an Apple ][ and you had to share it with 23 other classmates. OH NOES!!!
Yeah, but life back then sucked compared to now. I wish I had been born a decade later just so that I would never have had to deal with:
trudging to the library to get info for a report
hand writing essays
typewriters
not to mention non-school related things like:
snail mail
print newspapers
lack of instant free porn
Just because we had to put up with this crap doesn't mean kids should still have to. Or maybe they should... lil' bastards.
"Alternatively can anyone say why this is silly?"
Because students learn less when there's a computer in front of them. There's a place for computers, and computer education, and learning to use them as tools. It's not in most classrooms.