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Some Schools Ending Laptop Programs
The New York Times reports that schools are abandoning their laptops-for-students programs. It turns out that the expense of providing laptops, expense of repairing laptops, difficulties of school network management, and discipline problems stemming from pornography, cheating, and cracking more than outweighed the educational benefits. Indeed, a number of schools have concluded that far from improving student achievement, laptops either had no effect or actively hindered academic performance. Apparently, politicians embracing technology as a quick fix for social problems doesn't always work out.
I'm shocked!
News at 11.
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C1 bottles of beer on the wall. Take one down, pass it round... Oh, umm...
Wow... and it only took them a couple of million to figure that out.
Seriously, I never thought that full blown laptops would help students (I myself having just recently finished high school). What WOULD help is something tablet-like that stores all our books in electronic form, which we could pretty much WRITE one. Seriously, that way they wouldn't have to lug around 6-7 books and erase their notes from the books when done with the materials. Would have my made high school years easier.
lot of education soft does not work with it and the web sites for the text books on line that need to have admin to install / run right and things like deep freeze may help it still does not stop people form useing stuff that does not need a reboot to run.
"There are seldom good technological solutions to behavioral problems." -- Ed Crowley
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
If they are going to give out computers, I think making low cost desktops available for home use would be a far more efficient use of resources.
SpyDock: Scientific Python in a Docker container
Kids don't need technology, they need an education. I think they can be given an excellent education without ever involving a computer.
And I agree, when I was in a computer class I spent more time actively hacking (in both senses of the word) their system, than doing work. Bootlegged their PC DOS 6.3 installation. Used Word 6 for Windows instead of Works 3 for DOS. (Or used WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS.) Et cetera. I obviously want to make the most of my time, but it was stuff I already knew. That's not the case for most kids, they need to be paying attention to the teacher, not their PCs, and you know kids have reverse midas touches and wreck everything...
-uso.
What you hear in the ear, preach from the rooftop Matthew 10.27b
Imagine a LAN party.
Now imagine that LAN party comes with free hardware, you don't have to bring your own.
Now, imagine that LAN party has free Internet access, is open all day long, and you HAVE to go attend it each and every day.
So, how much work are you doing ? Yup, right, almost none at all.
Suddendly, schools realize that LAN party I describe above is on school grounds, with school hardware, and it goes on all schoolday long.
What a big surprise...
By reading this signature you agree to not disagree with the post you just read.
When you're old enough to have a beer you're old enough to have a computer running Windows. Believe me, you'll need the beer. I'm impressed that the network security is such a 10 year old can breech it!
Kids rarely appreciate what is given to them. If they had made it a program that rewarded students with academic success and achievement their results would have been different. Blindly giving them to all students undoubtedly would fail. Most kids these days happily trash everything they encounter. It's why most intelligent parents don't give their kids a nice car as their first automobile. They get a POS that no one cares about and can easily be replaced. Then the kid earns their own nicer car (or earns the first one off the bat depnding on the financial status of the family etc).
We can argue all day about the educational benefits of these laptops but if the kids just trash them from the get go there are no educational benefits. I wouldn't trust kids today with a pen let alone a laptop.
Why would have anyone have thought that laptops would have helped schools in the first place?
Was there any studies done to show that it would augment learning, or was it just a matter of technology=cool?
And, if there were any studies done, were there any studies done not funded by industry groups wanting school districts to spend lots of money?
Hopefully I didn't put any [] around my words.
At my sons school, the in-class PCs were rarely used for class work. Instead, the kids loaded 'em up with video games,
music videos, and viruses/trojans/worms/spyware/spamware. No virus software or such. No patches were ever applied
( M$ machines). The school had no one to repair or troubleshoot stuff. This was all after a big push to get PCs in the
classroom. There were wiring parties and meetings to show off how great it was to get a PC in the classroom. Went nowhere.
A mad rush to bring our schools into the 21st century. Didnt work.
A school is a log with a teacher at one end, and a student at the other. (I first heard it in a Heinlein story, but I'm sure it predates RAH.)
All the rest of this stuff is fluff.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens.
I think one of the biggest paradigm shifts that people are going to have to adjust to is the idea that information, like many other things, is now often causing a problems with too much, and not with too little.
Having constant access to information does not mean you are educated. Becoming educated is more than just having access to information. You can give a student a laptop, with built-in or internet access to a database of information on anything in the world, and that doesn't make them educated. A fully 3D, interactive CD-Rom showing the human anatomy isn't what is needed for someone to become a doctor. Its the understanding of the basic concepts, and the discipline to understands how information fits into the big picture that allows people to really be educated. Without out, information is just a distraction.
Hopefully I didn't put any [] around my words.
Or is it because they're more ahead of the tech curve than their masters? I think the real problem is that those in charge thought they could solve problems with laptops, but instead created new ones that they had no clue how to deal with. I'm sure if the staff of said schools were qualified to be able to assist students, maybe they they ahve wouldn't seem such a big deal.
We're all hypocrites. We all have hidden parts, it's the contrast between them that make us more a hypocrite than others
A few years ago the fashion was for colleges to go with laptop programs. The students would buy/rent standard laptops from the college and would have network connections in all the classrooms and labs (this was a couple of years before wifi). Part of the attraction for the colleges was that they would no longer have to supply computer labs and they would thus save money. Strangely, it didn't actually save money and most colleges didn't make the switch.
The trick with teaching is getting the students to engage with the material. If you can control what is on the laptop at every instant it might be ok but otherwise the darn thing is just a source of distractions. If the teacher isn't exceptionally organized the laptops will produce the opposite of student engagement.
"I think one of the biggest paradigm shifts that people are going to have to adjust to is the idea that information, like many other things, is now often causing a problems with too much, and not with too little. Having constant access to information does not mean you are educated. Becoming educated is more than just having access to information."
Nah. And as an example look at slashdot.
If it is not porn, then myspace, then youtube, then IM, then video games...Come on, what were they thinking?
You don't have to be smart to use a Mac, you just have to be smart enough to buy one
My undergraduate university had a laptop program, and it was one of the great things about the school. Every student received a laptop as part of his or her tuition; each year was furnished with the same model of computer, so students' technology capabilities were roughly equal across the class year. The program let people like me, who didn't own computers before college, get one for a reasonable price and it discouraged theft because everyone had pretty much the same computer anyway. Teachers could assign projects or expect students to utilize certain software without having to contend with unequal access to technology, and the computer help center only had to train its employees to service a maximum of four machine types in any given year, so I imagine it cut costs there.
Of course, this is a different situation than the one discussed in TFA; we were college students, not high schoolers, and although our computers were under warranty, they were bought with our tuition money and belonged to us, so there was incentive to keep them nice. We also seldom, if ever, used the machines in class, but when we did, there was a good reason.
A laptop is a tool, just like any other. Tools can be misused, but they can also be instruments of success when applied correctly. Don't be so quick to shun the idea of school-issued laptops. When done right with the right age group, it can really work.
Citing the expense of providing and repairing laptops, difficulties of network management, and discipline problems stemming from pornography, cheating, and cracking that more than outweighed the productivity benefits, management at Armonk-based IBM is taking thousands of laptops away from employees.
The laptops are reportedly being sent to India and China, where labour is so cheap that low productivity doesn't exist.
That's the theory, in any case.
Rich And Stupid is not so bad as Working For Rich And Stupid.
"Apparently, politicians... [don't] always work out."
Wait....
They downloaded porn on their free laptops?
You mean.... if you give a bunch of middle schoolers free computers with ubiquitous Internet access and instructions on connecting to the Internet..... they might download porn?
But I thought children were sexless, innocent cherubs.
THINK OF THE CHILDREN!
Stew
There are 10 kinds of people in the world. Those who understand binary and those who don't.
Hmmm.. lets give a bunch of bored students a really nice toy and say.. Oh, you can't hack.. no no no..
The world is run by fucking morons!
..but how about all those uderpaid teachers whose lives could have been made a little bit better, by rewarding their crappy work with a better salary or bonus? Because, let's face it, being a teacher nowadays is really the pits. I've done it for a short while (replacing a physics teacher in a high school), and came out with an immense admiration for teachers' work.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
My first computer was a laptop i convinced my parents to get me for school for my 14th birthday. I will tell you it definately helped my grades especially in english. I went from getting C- in english for years to getting A's in english. and most of my teachers loved that i turned in every assignment neatly typed
Gee, you give a bunch of kids expensive laptops for cheap/free or mandate that parents buy them for their kids, then act shocked when they don't just use them for straight-up school work, but some students also misuse and abuse them!
Can you say "Duuuhhhhhhhh"?
Ad astra per aspera (A rough road leads to the stars)
They'll have few games to play, and they'll have to learn to compile the kernel just to get their homework done.
Laptops are difficult to handle in a corporate environment even today, what do you expect to happen in schools. We have even grownup executives taking laptop and connecting to it to outside corporate network, and bringing back viruses and trojans in the corporate network. Corporate IT dept. with all its might still strugle to keep all the laptops updated and patched.
GoplaTechnology could be very effective in schools. Hell, technology is very effective in schools now. Mass produced paper and ball point pens are a significant improvement over the chalk slates of yesteryear. They in turn, were better then the wet clay tablets of further back. The key here is that you need to introduce technology that can be targetted toward making specific things that we expect children to do at school easier. Just giving them a laptop is "introducing technology to schools", but it isn't introducing anything terribly helpful to current methods of teaching and education. It's a cheap political solution that sounds forward looking because it is "technology", but it does nothing. What would work? How about eBook readers with all the kids textbooks pre-loaded onto it? Better yet, an eBook reader with basic tablet functionality to let the student annotate the PDFs, and write notes -- that's as much as it needs to do. Much more and it is just a distraction. Simple targetted devices are the key. The OLPC project is onto something -- they are quite targetted in the software and OS they are putting on there -- maybe not ideal, but it is something. Why are we not seeing eBook readers taken up? First because politicians tend to be stupid, but second, it is because (let's face it) current eBook readers suck: they just aren't that good. When we have ePaper or similar with much better DPI (and they are starting to appear) things might change. Until then the technology simply isn't good enough to replace pen and paper.
Craft Beer Programming T-shirts
"Having access to information and memorizing some of it is nearly worthless."
Like one's times table.
Technology has it's place in education. It's not for every situation, and there are some things, like physics, chemistry, & math, that it's very, VERY helpful to have a real, live teacher to answer questions.
Here is my personal story:
In highschool, I was in our city's "drop-out recovery program" due to many absences caused by illness (fibromyalgia).
Our entire curriculum was delivered via computer - old 8086's and 286's to be exact, networked together with 10baseT, hooked up to a Novell Server.
Josten's Learning did the software - The curriculum was state accredited, meaning that it met certain requirements and goals our state sets up for it's highschool students.
I started out in January of 1999 with no highschool credits, passed the exit exam mid 1999, and finished my last class sometime early spring of 2000.
How was I able to do this in an underfunded program with just 1 actual teacher?
HARD WORK, combined with useful technology.
Almost every day, I got there at 7:30 or 8 AM in the morning, and stayed every day, well after normal hours, and into the afternoon session when the GED classes were held, until around 5 PM.
I even came in some saturdays!
In the summer of 1999, I was healed by God of fibromyalgia and have had no trouble from it since then! Since then I went on to earn two Associate Degrees at our Community College (120 semester hours in 2 years... not bad!) and a Bachelors Degree in Electrical & Computer Engineering from Auburn University.
Of course, I went through a few different online academies, so it was a necessity. I was home-schooled after elementary, it was only in high school that we went with online academies so that I could have a diploma instead of a GED. I went through four different associations, each better than the last. Ecot, which gave out woeful Compaq desktops and didn't have the slightest shred of organization. TRECA, which provided locked-down iMacs and practiced an overall totalitarian monitoring policy. Ohdela, which gave out decent laptops and had a fairly stable, if not hand-holding system. The best was BOSS (Buckeye Online School for Success); they provided adequate desktops, however I never used it as I took all book-based courses. Read the material, answer questions, send away for exam. That was perfect for me, as I was highly annoyed with the interactive classrooms and hand-holding lessons of the other schools. Of course, I'm sure I'm in the minority on that. I'm also sure that I'm in the minority when it comes to wiping out XP and installing Linux on the computers install. As I wasn't playing many video games on them, I found the OS more than suitable for school work.
"He who can destroy a thing, controls a thing." --Paul Atreides, Dune
Are all of these problems going to happen with the OLPC program? Will the children of third world countries really use these laptops appropriately? Granted, this new abundance of technology could be greatly beneficial to the young people of these countries, but it may also breed new problems as well.
And apparently the people who submit stories to /. sometimes betray their biases.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
This is why current OS are NOT tailored for students. Pretending Windows + Office will help getting a better education is simply dull. In this regard, I really hope the OLPC will work and may stimulate new development of finally useful educational platform.
The real issue with laptops in schools is ... what is the problem that the laptops are supposed to solve?
... something.
Nothing I've read indicates that ANYONE looked at the problem. They decided that the students "needed" laptops to "prepare" the students for
Think about it. It's kind of like giving kids a TV. Or a game console. Yes, there may be very specific instances where such would be useful (learning TV repair?) but on the whole, it's a fucking stupid idea.
Add to that the fact that (as they discovered) laptops are FRAGILE and it just gets worse.
Instead of focusing on technology, I'd rather see the focus on finding better educational models. We've all heard stories of kids who go from illiterate to college because they moved to a non-traditional school. Why can't we spend a fraction of the tech money seeing if we can find better low-tech (and therefore, more reliable) methods of educating our kids?
The average laptop probably won't last 4 years in high school. A book can last 20 years.
We were given 700Mhz IBM ThinkPads that somehow managed to run Windows XP Pro. (This was two years ago) We managed to brute-force Counter Strike 1.5 onto the things, running at about 20 fps in a 512x360-ish resolution in Software mode. It was more of a distraction than anything, but being able to write a paper while laying in bed was a nice productive thing about it.
For example, see a current LA Times story...
I am not sure what the answer is, but by the time kids are in high school, you ought to be able to stop coddling them and tell them straight-up; "you suck, learn to work a cash register", "you should work hard, you have the potential for a career", and "you are heading for a hard, short life on the streets and in jail - leave school now."
well, not new, just your run-of-the-mill lurker.
Anyway, I find TFA poorly researched and rather superficial, much like the whole school-issued-laptops program.
I've been a math teaching assistant at college for a few years, and have worked in IT most of my life. I feel somewhat qualified to have an opinion on this issue.
The problem is not the laptops. It is not the kids. It is not even the teachers. The problem is management (ie PHBs) not thinking stuff through, and lazy journalists. If I was a journalist I would try to get answers to these questions:
A) What was the plan of the program?
B) What did they expect to accomplish?
C) How was the actual implementation?
D) What analysis was done afterwards to correct the problem?
E) Why are the kids getting blamed?
I suspect the answers will be:
a)
1. Give laptops to kids
2. ?
3. Congratulate myself
b)
The more money I pour into laptops, the better kids grades will be. Just because.
c)
kids got laptops, and nobody (teachers and students) had any clue what to do with them, so they mostly fooled around. And the problems were with a. and b.
d)
Too busy blaming the kids for education management FUs.
e)
Because they are the weakest link.
Of course, other questions cross my mind:
- How many kids had used computers before?
- How many used them at home?
- How many parents got involved with the program?
- How many parents where computer-savvy?
- What budget did the teachers have available for computer courses for themselves?
and so on and so forth...
"Let there be one laptop per child.. And let that laptop cost $100 + some extra... And let me save yee impovrished nations that donate $100's of millions to my cause" Or something like that...
I could have told you that giving high school kids laptop computers to use in school would only make matters worse. I oft-times wonder where the common sense is in the administrative bodies that cook up these hair-brained ideas.
You see, here's the problem... High school is to kids, essentially, a place where they are forced to perform menial tasks and busy work for 8 hours a day with no reward and the only motivation is to avoid punishment (if they are indeed punished for bad grades/failure/dropping out). The incentive to excel academically is nigh nonexistent for the majority of high school kids. Introducing laptop computers to the mix does nothing but give the students a tool they can use to pay less attention to class with. After all, most of these kids aren't interested in doing much more than passing their courses... playing some solitaire or looking at some titties is much more entertaining than staring at the clock for 5 hours a day, waiting to be freed.
At university, however, laptop programs are far more beneficial. My university (Winona State) issues tablet computers to all students. Indeed there are still plenty of instances of students who decide to play solitaire rather than pay attention, their grades reflect it and (for the most part) their behavior changes accordingly. Personally, I take all of my notes on my tablet (I can type far faster than I can write by hand, and the professors can certainly talk faster than I can write!), and it is hellof convenient to be able to draw diagrams right into my notes digitally with the stylus. You can begin to imagine some of the benefits... like pressing Ctrl+F instead of flipping through pages upon pages of notes to find a definition. There's a whole boatload of advantages to the system and I'm sure most of you slashdotters can think of them yourselves.
My point is, the real driver behind the effectiveness of laptop programs is the students' motivation to excel in academically. High school doesn't give the motivation, so laptops will only help students actively perform poorly. In a university setting, however, there is motivation. Be it the fact that the student is paying for an education out of his/her own pocket (like me!), or that the student is seeking a degree in order to make money hand over fist, or that the student is studying something he or she is actually interested in and doing it of his/her own free will. Because of that motivation, students will utilize computers effectively.
If a lot of kids learned programming/hacking, networking skills, they could go and do useful things - despite what their grades may so. Did it reduce the grades of kids?
I can understand the repair issues - laptops for kids use have to be designed for kids - these things are very fragile.
My sister has been taking part in her school's laptop project for the past two years. From what we've seen, it is an extremely flawed system. Here are some problems we've encountered:
-Many of the teachers are opposed to this foreign technology overtaking their classrooms. Right there, 25% of classes will not have laptop usage. Furthermore, even more of the teachers don't even know how to use a laptop.
-There is no educational software provided. I know that there are some really good educational titles out there that would be a tremendous help in classrooms, but nobody is taking the initiative to install/support them.
-The laptops were aimed to lessen the use of textbooks. Oddly enough, they just add to the ever-growing pile of virtually useless school-provided materials.
-The security system is flawed as well. They are heavily restricted - that is, until you quit a certain task in the task manager - after that, visiting porn sites couldn't be easier!
-The aforementioned hardware problems.
What needs to happen is for the school districts to implement a laptop education program of some sort. One that will ease teachers' fears of computers/help them to better assist their students, and one that will teach kids the basics of computing (no, how to use Word doesn't count). This should have been done from the start. What needs to happen for this
Don't blame the technology of using computers in the classroom. What is needed is better educational programs and collaboration software.
An Education is the Font of All Liberty
what is the problem that the laptops are supposed to solve? Nothing I've read indicates that ANYONE looked at the problem. They decided that the students "needed" laptops to "prepare" the students for ... something.
As I recall, that "something" was "survival in the business world" and the solution was to tech kids how to use Word and Excel. Encarta and other "resources" were admitted to be inferior to those the school already had in the library. Of course that's a loser, but those pushing it made a lot of money selling licenses and hardware.
The irony of this is that free software has solved issues of fragility and also has created real resources for learning that are cheaper than conventional alternatives. KDE's educational package has math plotting, algebra manipulation, language studdies, flash card programs, star charts, periodic charts with chemical properties, isotopes and images, and more. Wikipedia is a vast resource that easily competes with printed encyclopedias. Google will help you dig it deeper. All of this is free, robust and actually gives students what schools want them to have.
The low price comes with a cost: finding people willing to push it. Parents, having been burnt, are now sceptical and anyone who would follow the frauds are going to be abused. The well has been poisoned by people who claimed that "computer literacy" was being able to work M$ Word and other now worthless non-free software.
Falling hardware prices may help turn things around, but the M$ laptop will always be expensive, fragile and barren of learning material.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
I like how the conventional Slashdot wisdom here is, "of COURSE giving students laptops is an idiotic waste of money!" when so many people here are also strong supporters of the One Laptop Per Child initiative. If making sure children in poor countries have access to computers is so important, how is doing the same for kids right here not as important, especially when kids here are probably much more likely to need computer literacy in their workplace?
1) Take the laptops and give them to 3rd world students instead.
2) These students will use them for learning instead of pr0n.
3) When they graduate with CS and engineering degrees, hire them on H1-B visas.
4) ???
5) Profit!
Have gnu, will travel.
"Apparently, politicians embracing technology as a quick fix for social problems doesn't always work out."
So, does that mean that politician don't work out?
Great. But wouldn't it be far more cost effective to teach those apps (or equivalents) in a computer lab or such? Maybe even have a class on "modern business technology"?
Mandatory car analogy
We don't purchase a car for each student just because we know that they're probably going to need to know how to drive, do we? Instead, we have a "driver's education" class where they get to practice with a few school owned and maintained vehicles.
Speaking as someone who is heavily involved in the specifics of a 4-year-old 1-to-1 laptop program in a school, I can state that it is a matter of integration, planning, and infrastructure. If you sit down and you recognize that lots of laptops will break, that the curriculum must be modified, that students will attempt to get around restrictions you will have a much better experience. If you just dump the laptops on the schools and expect it to work you're going to be in a world of hurt. This is not to say the deployment at my school/employer is flawless, far from it. We have all those problems and more. But they have not been crippling, because we planned and we have the integration and infrastructure in place to mitigate them.
I went to LHS, the first high school mentioned in the article and honestly, the staff they had were very lazy, the teachers knew next to nothing about computers, and not all students even had laptops. I was in the class just before they started the program (my brother was in the first class allowed to sign up for the laptop program) so I ended up buying my own laptop to bring to school for personal use.
The problems with the network staff at the school were any problems, they would blame the student and just re-image the system. Now, re-imaging is a quick solution but blaming the student wasn't fair. Also, they made the students pay ~$900 for the laptop which wasn't work $400 in my opinion. I believe in the first version of the laptop, it was an IBM thinkpad celeron 500-700 I believe. (I'm probably wrong) It made the system virtually useless outside of typing where you could buy your own system for marginally more money, get to keep it, and have it much more useful.
The biggest problem was allowing free access the the wireless network and then complaining when all of the students played Counter Strike during Academic Study (a 2hr study hall every other day for all students) so students doing any legitimate work wouldn't be able to because of the network being overloaded. Also, the teachers didn't know much about computers, which wasn't their fault but implementing a laptop program without training the teachers first is a bit useless.
Putting into place access restrictions and blocking net traffic with decent tools would have fixed a lot of the problems they had. Also, mandating that each student be given a laptop would have helped teachers since all of them would be working with students who had them. Since it wasn't mandatory (when I was there) a lot of students who couldn't afford them were left out which segmented the student body. However, using laptops in classes that aren't technical classes is a bit difficult. If they didn't expect this problem when they started the program, then they were blind. I had my laptop in my Computer Science 3-4 class and I got a lot of work done; but I also played a lot of Diablo 2 during classes. However, it did make keeping track of my notes a lot easier than stuffing them into my backpack. The laptops do get in the way more than help but the problems with overwhelmed networking staff, sub-par equipment, flaky networks (which could have been fixed with better restrictions on access), and uselessness in the classroom made these programs doomed from the start.
-SaNo
And it's worse than you can possibly imagine.
We were always told in meetings to have students use the laptops as much as possible (I imagine to justify the expense in supplying students with them). It didn't matter what we did, so long as we were using technology in the classroom. The other big push was the state achievement test (thank you very much Bush). We were never told of a definite way that we could use these computers to help improve test scores.
Of course, any chance that students have to goof off, they will, and any time my students got to use their laptop, they would be using it for IM, games, or just generally surfing the web. i tired to keep an eye on all of them, but when you have classes of 30+ students, it's difficult to make sure they are all on task with traditional kinds of instruction and assignments.
The most successful I ever was in that district was when I was teaching summer school. I think a large part of that was because the students didn't keep the laptops over the summer. I brought in a classroom set of laptops in for a day so they could type a paper. Before I brought them in, I unplugged the wireless router in the drop ceiling.
my pet machine
well, for the people that actually did benefit from them...
Finding more reliable methods of educating kids would be great, but how would the teachers unions make money on it? And if they don't, you can forget about it ever happening.
Some possible problems solved: ....a) A Pda, some phones, Ipods and gaming devices like PSP can also do it. ........i) No more heavy burden for students. ....a) teachers can't copy them because of copywrite? ....b) Libraries and subsidies for home computers could be given. ...a) This effort is negated if no supervision and training given. ...b) Will schools also subsidize dsl too? ...c) Can the laptop be taken back if it isn't being used properly?
1) Instead of text books they can carry e-books
2) Access to internet files....
3) Actual Computer usage is learned if a laptop is used...
Sounds like that "business" software with accelerated graphics drivers, a word processor and spreadsheet did not work out very.
Now imagine instead you have free software that does not play FPS or Flash - intentionally. Instead it comes with internet access that does not install flipping monkeys and blinking banners and keyloggers. It also happens to come with good algebra, math function plotting, 2 and 3D drawing programs, periodic charts, star charts, language study, flash cards and a host of other software that act as a small library of information. You know, like tools for learning instead of writting a quarterly profit and loss statement or playing video games.
OK, maybe some people are going to goof off and look at boobies all day. So what? Those are the kids that would be making drawings all day anyway. You can lead a horse to water but you cant make it drink.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
>Never memorize what you can look up.
With due respect to the man who said that, there's a lot to be said for caching. He probably had more memorized than he was fully aware of.
As a high school teacher, I can see a lot of benefits to having students with laptops. You could save a LOT of paper (it's amazing how much paper and toner is used on making handouts in our school every day), textbooks wouldn't have to be lugged around, assignments could be turned in electronically (no more "the teacher lost my assignment"), tests could be automatically corrected and students would have instant feedback., along with a lot of other benefits. The reality is, I rarely even go to the computer lab for anything class related because it's a waste of time. A lot of the websites with any interactivity are either blocked by the network, the computers don't have the right plug-ins (which students can't download and install themselves), or there is some other problem. Also, there are always a couple students in class that can't get on the network for some reason. This results in me wasting time emailing the tech department so they can reset his or her account. In the mean time, my student who can't get on the network has wasted a class period. The fact that the student was kicked off the network for downloading games in a different class is beside the point. With all the problems of just visiting a computer lab in an average high school in Middle America (and dealing with the "technology guy" who seems to invariably be a prick", I think it will be a while before we are ready for eSchool. Slowing the process even more is the teachers. My 50 year old coworkers usually need help loading a new program on their computer. They aren't going to be much help to students with a email issue, let alone be able to develop an electronic curriculum. It doesn't mean that they aren't good teachers (they do a much better job than me); it just means that they would need a couple years of training to get up to speed. Nobody has the time, money, or interest to do that. I think and hope schools will work toward the concept of every student having a laptop. I don't think it will work, however, until computers are as commonplace as pencils and paper and books, so students don't think of them as a novelty, but as a tool for getting their homework points.
I'm convinced its the teachers, not the students. When you give the students laptops you need to teach them differently, when done right it works great. For 7 & 8th grade my school gave me laptops (part of a Toshiba case study, Toshiba case study [PDF]), this started in '97 and they never had problems with it impacting student performance in any negative way. The classes are all small and the students all did as the teachers said, if you were not suppose to use the laptop you didn't have it out, it was that simple. Nobody could get distracted, when you used the computer the teacher would know what you were doing and would yell at you if you tried anything not related to school. Granted there are always those that will use a laptop for something they shouldn't, I found that if the teacher controls who uses a laptop and when, then its easy to prevent any negative affects. In my school the laptops were only used for non-school stuff when the student was off school (either in study or home), and cheating from laptops was non-existant as test were never given with the laptop present. At they school the program is going so well that this year they are extending the program to all students from 2nd to 8th grade, and i think it is a real example of how a laptop program should be run.
Funny Story: Henrico County in Virginia ended their laptop program in the schools. They were selling them to the public for $50. They anounced the sale date and time in advance and it caused a stampede where a number of people were injured. After living in Richmond for 4 years it doesn't surprise me that this occured here. The story is available at http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/8973616/
What I recall from K-8, a multiplication table is no bigger than a poster and easily fits on a small index card. It is nowhere to be seen on that site. Either this site is a joke, or it is mini-example of the sorry state of education. Simple-minded idiots making simple concepts excruciatingly painful and annoying to learn. If I were to magically transport into the body of a ten year old, no doubt I would get hauled out of class by the white coats as I scream "JUST GIVE ME THE FUCKING DATA!".
I was never clear on what this was supposed to remedy. Many adults have a hard time managing overly fragile laptops. I can only imagine the headaches with a child or teenager who hasn't really learned to respect the delicate nature of things yet. I'm guessing that they were attempting to help with the digital divide. However, I find that to be ludicrous in light of the purchase of laptops.
It would seem to me to be more reasonable to pay for a $9.95 dial up connection to a local ISP for each family with children enrolled in school than it would be to spend $500-$1000 per child to supply them with a laptop. At a $1000 per family (not per child) that's about 8 1/2 years of Internet access. Furthermore, the average family with children has 2.3 children. This means that the same $9.95 a month would cover the other one or two children also in the home, thus lowering the overall cost.
Let the family purchase their own computer. The prices are down and many new computer models are available at local electronics shops here for $200-250 each. Furthermore, if the family has to pay for it, perhaps it will be treated with a bit more respect.
2 cents,
Queen B.
HDGary secures my bank
We rolled out the clients before the servers. Education reform via technology is a worthwhile and important goal, but it's important to understand where the money is spent, not how much. Technology should belong to the administration, then the teachers, then the students.
Unlike what was available in the 50s (perhaps the last major upheaval of our public schools), we now have cheap databases capable of managing the unique information generated by every student and teacher. We should be digitizing all paperwork and grading, to relieve teachers of the ever-growing responsibility to micromanage, and tracking student progress much more individually that we currently do. Let teachers do what computers can't, and let the computers do what we shouldn't have to. Computer labs and laptops do nothing to further this.
Once a solid infrastructure is installed and the administration understands how to utilize the technology, then we make sure every child is connected and has a say. Of course, by then, I'm sure they'll have it figured out themselves.
Doesn't the whole push to have computers in the classroom amount to a big giant love-in for indoctrinating the masses into using powerpoint?
Does anyone remember a slashdot article from 5 years or so ago, a journalist went into a school that was touting the greatness of computers in the classroom? He wrote aboute an elementary school kid who did a beautiful and fantastic whiz bang job on a history powerpoint presentation. Kid got accolades and the staff
were slap happy patting themselves on the back but nobody but the journalist figured out that the kid got the facts of the history report wrong?
This is time for the big, collective "D'uh!" we've been holding about this for a while.
As technologists I think we know better than the bureaucrats who propose these "nuggets of wisdom" that technology does not fix the fundamental problems in education.
...politicians embracing technology as a quick fix for social problems doesn't always work out
What? It's not only politicians. I recall a lot of Slashdotters saying what a great idea laptops for everyone in schools would be.
I think that the problem with computers in the classroom as it stands now is that no one quite knows what to do with them. In the late 90's there was a whole plan to "wire" all the schools for internet access. Lacking from this plan was any idea how to use that access. The government wasted millions of dollars. I suppose that the idea may have been to use it as a reference, since we all know that if it is on the internet it must be true! My mom taught high school and has all sorts of stories about what happened with computers and internet access in classrooms.
Handing each student their own personal laptop is the stupidest goddamn thing I've ever heard.
Technology was not used to that incredible extent at my high school, but we did have laptop carts available to supplement the library and computer lab(s). When a class needed to do a computer-oriented project, the IT people would roll in two or three carts (with 16 laptops apiece, I think) and let students check them out. Each cart had chargers built in, as well as a wireless access point, so the cart would be plugged into ethernet to create instant wireless access in that classroom.
We would do the task at hand, and the laptops would all be returned at the end of class. People didn't mess with them because of the futility in doing so. The systems were locked down, and anything you did manage to change would be wiped off at the end of the day anyway.
One of these days, I'm going to cut you into little pieces.
The problems they are having are mostly network-management related. Just ecause most schools have really pathetic IT departments has nothing to do with the educational value of using computers in school. Is the pricetag of an adequate IT department high - YES, but the idea that some kids are leaving high school TO THIS DAY wotout learning to integrate a computer into their daily work is horrifying! Anyone who believes it's not an absolutely baseline neccessary skill, and will continue to be for the forseable future, is lying to themselves.
As to their educational problems - yes, some exist. That has more to do with having TEACHERS who are capable integrating computers into their programs. Having a computer and an internet connection at your fingertips CHANGES the way you work, and a lot of teachers are, frankly, morons to begin with. Especially the old-guard who can't tell a keyboard from typewriter.
Anyone can buy a paper off the internet - so maybe the answer is to demand more of the student using a computer than a simple text paper.... and there are a lot of ways of detecting plagerism, and they work with a respectable level of consistency.
As to the porn, stop being so bloody prudish! This fear that child might see people having sex in nasty ways is even more stupid than the hooplah about viloent video games and television. Is it reasonable to expect the students not be porn surfing in class, sure, but if you think most of those same 14 and 15 year olds (just an example - I was porn hunting before I was 12) aren't finding porn at every chance they get - bith on and off the computer - you have forgotten what it's like to be a teenager.
Everything and everyone is an aspect of Gd. So remember to show proper respect!
All and all, as you said, the laptop didn't solve any unsolvable problem and it was heavy to haul around. The idea that the schools would make students get laptops and then their grades would automatically go up is just one of those great management blunders that only our Universities are capable of. If the student is lazy, unmotivated, unprepared, no amount of laptops, iPods, graphing calculators or specal software is going to fix that. The Chinese kids from the math graduate deptartment didn't have any laptops growing up, just paper and pencils and they are way, way ahead of the American students who grew up with fancy tech gadgets.
But I understand that it is easier for us to just throw some laptops at studnets, pay x amount of money, as opposed to revise from ground up the priorities of our education system.
AutoCAD, for example? Mathematica? SAS/Stat? Websphere? Photoshop? Windows? Help me out here, I'm trying to come up with some other "now worthless non-free software" that I can recommend to my friends' kids not to touch. Especially "M$" software, because we all know no one uses that anymore.
There is of course the difference between an educational software package that teaches, say, spelling, and "M$" Word, which is not educational tool. So I'm not sure how you can tie the two together?
BTW, Encarta - when it was released - was simply amazing. One of my nephews spent uncounted hours (this is 1997) exploring and learning Encarta. In fact, IIRC the article about Johann Sebastian Bach had a small sample of the Brandenburg concerto (BMW 1048), which he loved. That lead to my buying him a Bach CD "sampler", which got him on the road to other composers like Vivaldi, Brahms and Mozart.
I haven't seen Encarta in a while, and though teh interwebs have largely superceded its niche, I'm sure it's at least valuable from a production/quality/self-contained standpoint.
Honestly, I find it disturbing (if not downright pathetic) that someone would dismiss a product like Encarta (especially when it was first released) just because it comes from Microsoft.
I think that depends on the laptop and the books you're comparing it to. My laptop weighs 7 pounds (a bit of a heavyweight, but cheap!) and most of my college textbooks weigh about 2-3 pounds (yes, I weighed them). They're mostly bigger than the ones I had in high school, which I'd guess were 1-2 pounds on average. Add 2 textbooks + a full binder and you're looking at about 7 pounds, roughly the same as the laptop. (Not every class has a textbook, and not every textbook needs to be taken home or to school every day.)
Not every school book can be replaced by a laptop, either. Say I need a sketchbook every second day, plus a pencil case to go with it. I wouldn't want to read a Dickens book on a backlit screen, so add an 800-page novel to that. Obviously, I'm not going anywhere without lip gloss, hand cream, and a spare hair clip... I mean, really. It's raining, so I need an umbrella. Can't forget the power adaptor for the laptop, or the battery will be dead by lunch.
Add to that a lunch, a drink, gym clothes, and whatever else, and you're looking at 10-20 pounds easily.
I'm not saying computers in schools can't help these problems, but we are so not there yet. The screen readability is probably the first thing that needs to be fixed. I've saved a lot of money--at least $300 in the past 2 years, and a lot of time--by using Project Gutenberg (for example) for public domain texts. But my eyes were pretty tired by the end of it, and reading just isn't as quick or easy on a screen.
The other problem is getting e-texts (or educational programs) accepted and used by the teachers. All the teachers in the school who can use these things must or the benefits are negligible.
(Problem #3 is, how do you get the kids to use their computers for *school* instead of playing games, chatting, looking up porn, etc. But when did kids behave, anyway? Let it go already.)
As of this posting, there have been 100+ replies, and I haven't noticed many that are actually pro-laptop...
I work for a school district, in the tech department, and one of the latest buzzwords is 1:1 computing, giving kids laptops. Some interesting things to note: They gave out hundreds of laptops to a test district in Maine. They got all of them except about 10 back. 7 of those non-returned laptops were given to teachers. Also, the students that received the laptops had an increase in test scores compared to those who didn't.
I think our school kids are sorely lacking motivation to learn, and one of the big reasons is that everything worth doing for them is in a digital format - text messaging, social networking, reading, recreation - anything that helps us get students to view school as important or exciting is good in my book.
Come on, slashdotters. You of all people should be advocating this.
-ccm
Too much Law; not enough Order.
Laptops are just a tool like pencil and paper. A student can draw "rude" things or write cheat notes with a pencil and paper just as easily as downloading porn or instant messaging to cheat.
;-)
We have to teach how children how to behave appropriately, that downloading porn or pornographic doodling is not appropriate when you are supposed to be learning, and that cheating really doesn't help in the long run.
These are the temptations and pressures they will experience when they leave school and I see no better place (considering students probably spend more time awake at school than at home) for them to learn how to live with them.
Laptops are the pencil and paper of today and the future. With the Internet they can be used to do amazing things, and we should be teaching our children how to use them to do amazing things.
I'm sure there were similar debates when the first pencil and paper were introduced to schools
Cheers,
Ashley.
--
Ashley Aitken
Perth, Western Australia
mrhatken at mac dot com
Schools and politicians have this belief that money solves problems. Buying laptops is a high tech and expensive way to babysit kids. Since every kid spends oodles of time playing video games and surfing the web, politicians and teachers thought that buying laptops was the best way to get all kids to learn. Throwing money and technology at the problem wasn't the solution.
The real issue here is a poor educational system. Teachers need to be paid based on merit. Students with poor discipline need to flunk. Instead, educators think flunking a student is a sign of a bad school, or a bad teacher. Parents can't believe that they are responsible for their childrens' inability to learn. They coddle their children, blaming everyone but themselves or their children.
We've grown into an age where kids don't care. Teachers are not given the power to teach properly, nor are they incented to do so. They go through the motions, and whatever happens, happens.
The teachers unions have crippled the entire process. The unions protect the worst teachers. Unions also drive the best teachers out of the system, leaving us with a system that gradually deteriorates. Unions always blame lack of funding. They line up the poor kids, pointing at how little money is spent on kids' educations. Yet most of the funding increases don't go to teachers' salaries. It goes to administrative costs, new buildings, and golden parachutes for administrators.
What we need is for teachers to be held accountable. And for those students that refuse to do the work, disciplinary action. Flunk them. Put them into a trade school. Europe has a pretty good system. If a student doesn't show aptitude for higher learning, send them to a different type of high school... one that is geared towards learning a trade.
Instead, schools just try to keep students in their classrooms, because headcount means tax dollars. And tax dollars are the only things that school administrators care about. They have no interest in grades. They have no interest in test scores. They get their money no matter what grades or test scores happen.
Laptops were seen as an easy way to throw money at their educational woes. "We need to do this to stay competitive." The insuation was that America was losing ground to the students elsewhere in the world. A computer for every child HAD to be the solution. Ignore the work. Ignore the fact that they actually have to learn something. Let's just buy the technology, and the rest will just fall into place.
Balloney. After this spending fiasco, the rest of the tax payers should wake up and force the teachers unions and school districts to change their ways. Paying teachers regardless of performance is RIDICULOUS. Throwing money at problems is careless and irresponsible. It's downright sad. To think that money, and not real work, will solve our educational woes.
Studies show they work in lower income schools with students who have no access to computers or the internet. If the kids already have that at home then they will use it as a toy rather than a tool
http://saveie6.com/
I am a college student who came from Korea who attended highschool in US and attending college in US now. Last 10 years the Korean government have been IT-inizing schools as a effort to improve Korea's image as a technologically advanced nation. So by 2002, all the classrooms in Korea, Grade1 through Grade12, we have 100% of the classrooms have fast internet, computers, big projection tv or projector installed. Spent billions for that and of course everything installed was all korean made. I for one, do not agree with investing huge money on technology for schools grade1-12. I think the priority is to improve textbooks and update it every 6 month or so and hiring good teachers: native language speaking foreign language teachers. and better equipments for science experiments and building gyms and provide expensive piano and drums etc for bands, goes on for tons of things in school. IT is still way too expensive and inefficient. Surely teachers like new projectors so that they don't even make the notes themselves and do not need to write it on the board each class. and kids go home and download it from their homes so that school doesn't have to print it. but that way kids never look at the notes. in fact one teacher, when i was a student in Korea, made very good powerpoint presentation for her history class and everyone payed attention. but it really depends on the teacher to teach and make it interesting not the technology. I also enjoyed history class in US highschool with no projector and videos. (i hate history but i was just lucky meeting good teachers) My conclusion is that industry group is just lobbying so hard that normal folk's flesh biting tax money goes to extra greasy butt of ceo of technology firms. tell me when paper like tablet pc that is cheap as best seller mp3 player is out there....
Kids in high school/middle school can not be trusted with the technology that is given to them. At my high school the "computer club" was nothing more then a bunch of kids playing computer games on the Java Programming labs computers. It made it difficult to actually do some work after school with them playing games. Of course what do expect from kids who think testing and designing video games will make them rich.
Yes, that's what the laptops were trying to do; that is the problem they were trying to solve. Imagine that -- a school, trying to use technology to prepare kids for life *beyond* school. Kids in school now will have jobs that haven't been invented yet, using technology that we haven't seen/can't imagine yet. They need to learn using technology, period. Does it have to be laptops? No, but it's a convenience sometimes in a school (most high schools, for example) where students move from class to class, often in different buildings or sometimes blocks away, and where they might not have technology at home. Unfortunately it's obvious here (at least to me) that the problem was not the laptops. The problem was the teachers, admin, and any other support or technical staff (as a whole). Technology is just a tool, as was said here previously. It's *not* like a TV, or a game console. It's a tool you use to get things done. Other examples of tools that we give our students -- OH, and that we TEACH them how to use -- so that they are successful in the world beyond graduation include things like pencils, pens, paper, calculators, binders, and increasingly more this includes things like books, digital cameras, musical instruments, and now perhaps laptops. My guess (it's just a guess) is that part of this problem stems from the fact that the teachers themselves do not know how to use the technology, so how the heck can you train a teenager to USE the technology to be a critical thinker, an inquirer, and a problem solver? Our schools are out of date, and it's really very sad. The students who will succeed are the ones who have just a bit more drive than the "average" and who have access to technology outside of school. They will be the innovative ones who get those jobs that haven't been invented yet.
When I went to college the first week we were visited by the dean and told, if you want to graduate you have to try but 70% of you wont be here to graduate. About 10% of us graduated on time as software engineers. The others left for numerous reasons, cheating, grades, too difficult, partying more important, lack of interest, life, etc... Most of us had our own laptops for the last two years and though it wasnt required I dont know how I could have completed 25 to 30 credit hours per term and work a full time job without it. I maintained my own laptop as did the others and frankly given my profession if I couldnt maintain it I shouldnt graduate anyway. If there was porn on it then pat me on the back for finding time to look at it. So with all that blah blah blah, my thoughts are take the laptops off the budget. If they need it let them get a job and buy one. If its broke let them manage getting it fixed, thats a true life skill these days anyway, a valuable lesson. If they surf porn on it, dont shake their hands. If they use it to cheat, kick them out, tell them they cant use a laptop on campus again, fine them, or all the above.
Big business wont tolerate porn or cheating with company assets so pass that lesson forward in school as well. If you catch em deal with em but dont punish those that are benefitting honestly from the laptops.
As far as the school not maintaining a network..... join the 21st century, maybe its the schools that need to learn a little, build an adequate network and pay a couple tree hugging nerds a low salary to maintain it. Their everywhere!
All in all my laptop was my greatest tool in school.... well next to Mt Dew!?!?
are two-fold. 1) if there are alternatives to the education program avaiable on the laptop eg looking on youtube for the next piece of stupidity from some brainless wanker, then thats the route most students will take. 2) most teachers have no effin idea - me included - how to integrate a laptop into a math class for example. Firstly a lot of teachers arent well versed in more than the basics of how to use a computer, and secondly a lot of so called interactive software is just shit.
Those who brought the laptops into the system were themselves products of the system. They went through the same schools. The confirm that high school is about fads.
"...discipline problems stemming from pornography, cheating, and cracking..."
So. they're learning something, right? What's the problem? How else are they going to learn, right?...it's school afterall!
Or am I missing something here by not being locked into the mainstream, lockstep pogram?
Down With Slashdot BETA!!! I've been around the corner and seen the oliphant; you can only abuse me from your perspecti
how everyone is all hoorah for that stupid OLPC project, then slam the EXACT SAME THING here.
http://www.heise.de/ct/schlagseite/07/08/gross.jpg
(In German, but you get the idea without the text)
That's what happens when you put something as important as education in the hands of a state-sponsored monopoly.
Jesus is coming -- look busy!
Every time a new technology comes along, the education establishment embraces it as a silver bullet that will deliver knowledge while keeping the students' interest.
When movies came along students sat through all sorts of educational movies as a way educating them and engaging them.
Students were subjected to film strips.
I was a professor when TV came along. The university had a new building devoted to TV lectures. I had to film a few lectures. They were terrible! All except the most telegenic faculty had the same experience. Very soon the building devolved to a lecture hall with an unused TV system.
Computers were hailed as a magic solution. We see where that is going.
Education consists of an engaging teacher and engaged students. Without those, all the newest gadgets are useless. With them the gadgets are superfluous.
Of all the tools I thought were useful in college for helping learn, having working projectors and white boards in every room helped a great deal. The projector is good because it allows the professors to spend more time talking about the subject instead of writing nasty, ugly looking notes on a chalk board. More so, it gives students the opportunity to have the presentations at some point to study from. No these aren't replacements for your own notes, but it helped me tremendously in the past.
I think better textbooks would help tremendously, i.e., course material that isn't designed by someone trying to do a social experiment. It actually amazes me that the same quality management criteria used in business can't be applied to the generation of these books. That is, the text books should improve gradually over time, not radically to try some math teaching method of the month club.
You know what is interesting about this article and the article on slashdot concerning the VT shooting is the sheer ineptitude of your writing. This point of discussion put into the article is inflamatory at best and ignorant at worst. I work at a company that specializes in educational technology. We have worked both with institutions that have a 1-1 program and some that don't. Some 1-1 programs work, some do not. It all depends on the holisitic attitude in which technology is integrated into the classroom. The success most definitely depends on how willing the school system is to open the educational process to the creative inclinations of the learner. The problem of an institution adopting 1-1 is that they are an institution. They have invested in processes and philosophies that either don't apply or become of differing priorities in a 1-1 situation. So that you have an example of success we support a completely virtualized school system with over 9000 K-12 students that are full time enrolled and another 15000 part-time enrollements. This systems has been in place and running for the past 7 years. We recently completely revamped the LMS and CMS systems to great success. We provided more oversight for the educational institution and greater freedom for learners (teachers and students) inside the system. Their graduation ceremonies are so emotionally powerful and have such a great impact on the community they must rent an entire stadium of the largest university in the state to hold everyone. It serves those students that never survived the traditional system. Those students that are smart enough to get through school in short years, learn individually, or were not supported by their social peers. So this is my goodbye to /.. I'm afraid I'm off to find another news feed for technology. Not because of the technology (i.e. laptops or software) but because of the bully platform your using it for. The 1-1 programs are revolutionizing education where the implementation is smart enough to support education and the community is creative enough to find it's opportunities and capitalize on them. Where they are not, we are learning lessons as well. NO amount of money is too small to spend on education. I can think of hundreds of millions of dollars wasted by our government. I sure hope they waste more of it on education, technology, and the betterment of our nation than some of the other initiatives we have lately.
Again, as usual.
What was the problem again?
Porn? No problem. Seriously. Let the parents deal with it. If they can't, their problem. Not mine.
Cracking? No problem. Let the industry deal with it. Their problem, not mine.
Cheating? Problem. Deal with it. Stop handing out crib tests and premade textbook checkbox tests but make tests that actually test (gah, someone hand me a thesaurus) the knowledge of your pupils!
There is nothing that outweighs the advantage of more knowledge and better education. Nothing.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Damm word's spell check
I'd disagree, I've used a PPC, and two laptops during the last five years of education. The first laptop was brilliant and helped me a lot. I was able to take better history, economics and computing A level notes which were a great deal clearer when compared to my class mates. This was helped by the fact there was no wireless network in the school (apart from a single brand new 802.11a transmitter.) My laptop broke so I moved to a PPC device with a Bluetooth keyboard, this was great at taking notes except when math was involved. Unfortunately my degree is math intensive so I ended up taking just as many written notes as electronic. While this sounds unproductive once I got home I took the written notes and typed them up into electronic notes. I effectively went over the class material, it forced me to, so my understanding of the material was better. A PPC is slow enough that surfing the web and typing word documents is difficult.
Lastly I bought a laptop this year, its been a wonderful tool, but the problem of surfing the web during inane and boring lectures became an issue. In fact I stopped going to my business module lectures when the lecturer took to roaming the class and rudely telling people to stop what they were doing if it wasn't his PowerPoint slide on the screen. Believe it or not the third time that I decided to open ISIS and design a circuit board because he was going over the same simple theory (which we had already covered in a previous year) for 25 minutes and he had a go at me I ceased attending and just revised from the notes.
I would encourage the use of PDA's and PPC's (with a wireless keyboard) for none math based modules it certainly helped my grades that year. Laptops are more of a mixed bag, sure like a PPC you can see the lecture notes but laptops can do a lot more.
The real issue here is a poor educational system. Teachers need to be paid based on merit. Students with poor discipline need to flunk. Instead, educators think flunking a student is a sign of a bad school, or a bad teacher. Parents can't believe that they are responsible for their childrens' inability to learn. They coddle their children, blaming everyone but themselves or their children.
We've grown into an age where kids don't care. Teachers are not given the power to teach properly, nor are they incented to do so. They go through the motions, and whatever happens, happens.
There are many causes, not the least of which is parents who either don't care so if their kid is suspended he or she just sits at home playing video games for a few days; or who come screaming and blame the teacher when their precoius spawn is punished. Guess what, at some point teachers stop caring and don't waste their time on the losers - push them through and forget about them.
The teachers unions have crippled the entire process. The unions protect the worst teachers. Unions also drive the best teachers out of the system, leaving us with a system that gradually deteriorates.
It's a shame that local teacher's unions aren't as powerful as some believe; then maybe teachers could exert authority and maintain discipline instead of worrying that parents complaints will result in a bad review and not being rehired.
Good teachers leave because they are good - and can make a lot more money with a lot less hassle in another job.
Unions always blame lack of funding. They line up the poor kids, pointing at how little money is spent on kids' educations. Yet most of the funding increases don't go to teachers' salaries. It goes to administrative costs, new buildings, and golden parachutes for administrators.
That's because the unions don't have the power to control spending - in our district (rather well off one) I don't know a single teacher who wouldn't like to be able to direct spending so they wouldn't run out of copy paper 2 months before the end of the year or buying textbooks so each student has their own copy. (Real cases).
What we need is for teachers to be held accountable. And for those students that refuse to do the work, disciplinary action. Flunk them.
Accountability without authority is useless. Take away a kid's cellphone because they're texting during a test - Mom or Dad will come screaming at the administrator and teacher "How dare you do that to my little darling" instead of saying "Tough luck, child; you knew the rules and broke them"
There are a lot of great teachers, who care and whose main reward is to see some kid discover they can learn. Personally, that would not be enough for me to put up with all the other crap.
Don't even get started on "No Child Left Behind."
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
There a lots of valid comments here about how the programs are poorly thought through. There seems to be a critical gap in thinking about what happens between pumping in massive resources on one end and the chances of getting a vague but honorably sounding result at the other. Somehow its believed that this things will just happen.
All well and good, but where is the perspective. Substitute 'laptops' for American Troops and 'schools' for Iraq. Notice any similarities? This is the way the country is being run now.
Europe has a pretty good system. If a student doesn't show aptitude for higher learning, send them to a different type of high school... one that is geared towards learning a trade.
It's a good theory (that I agree with) but it's not going to fly in the U.S. I grew up in a small town in the middle of nowhere. Generally if you got a good blue collar job or worked in a trade it was all the same since you got paid well. Personally I decided to go into engineering for whatever reason and went between a few colleges and I've been around the country a bit more. And I was in fact sort of surprised by what I saw. People simply refusing to go into blue collar jobs because they involved "work". They'll go to college to be a programmer and get fired and work at McDonald's just fine, but wound never consider being a garbage man. I've also seen an absurd number of kids in college who were simply shoved there by their parents. They have no direction and typically flunk out after a time.
In both ways the parents wouldn't want their kids going to the "dumb" (practical) school, and all kids seem to think they are entitled to a white collar job where they sit on their ass and get paid a lot. It's too bad because I think the European system certainly has its merits.
Just a general reminder for everyone in case someone from the press calls: we are FOR the One Laptop Per Child program, we are AGAINST the laptops in school program.
-- Religion is not an exact science
I think you have it right. It's Ready, Aim, Fire. Not Ready, Fire, Aim.
A few years ago while pulling cat5 cable through the overhead of a school, I found the remains of a Cable TV system. the cables had simply been pulled out of the classrooms and back up into the overhead at some point.
In point of fact, just about every non-telephone related advance in communications technology has been hailed as a major advance in education; put into the schools; pretty much failed; and either been rejected or has been relegated to a minor role. That includes motion pictures, TV, Video recorders, PCs, the Internet, laptops, whiteboards, etc. With the exception of classroom PCs and maybe the Internet, the story has been the same. Lots of initial enthusiasm; spending a bunch of money; and finding that the technology has limited or no utility.
There are voices that try to tell folks that laptops are fragile, hard to use, none too reliable, easy to mislay, entirely too stealable -- and that very little proven curriculum related material is available. No one listens. If you ask me, what we need isn't more (or modestly better) technology. It's better decision makers at all levels in society.
You can't see ANYTHING from a car, You've got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk...Edward Abbey
the collective DUH! from thousands of /.ers. Can any of us claim even the slightest surprise at the outcome of those programs?
load "$",8,1
I used to work for a college IT director who posed the following question in response to every non-trivial request for new technology: What is the problem for which this is the solution? If the requester couldn't provide a clear and compelling answer, they usually ended up dropping the request on their own, or in some cases he'd have to tell them "no". The advocates of giving laptops to schoolkids have never provided a clear and compelling answer. (This is assuming that you already have computer labs available. If you don't, then that's the best solution to your computer-literacy problem.)
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
For the simple reason that a PDA can almost do everything which a laptop can. And yes; the keyword here is almost. There will always be a little gap which would really try to get students to push their limits. Sure, there are a few limitations here and there, but nothing which (as far as I can see) would stand in the way of its purpose.
It is perfectly easy to write documents on a PDA. It will be a bit more tedious but hey; if people like to work digital then they'll just have to cope. OR... find their way around the data entry and get a keyboard hooked up. Gee, I wonder how that works...
And while you'll still get issues of abuse I think it will be a lot easier to control in the overal. So, bottom line: Don't hand those guys a PC where they can do just about anything and also a little homework but give them something on which they can only do the things intended while leaving open some room for discovery.
Politicians embracing technology - even science fiction writers couldn't come up with a more foolish scenario.
== First cross river, then insult alligator.
I am shocked! Shocked! To discover there's pornography on a computer. And students finding ways to cheat. And that there are students smart enough to hack the secure systems of a high school.
- A laptop for every child. Insane. I won't go over the reality on this as it's already talked about in the article. I've been saying from day one this is stupid.
- Internet for everyone. Insane. People do not need the internet to survive or anything remotely close to that. If you give most 'poor' people internet access, they will simply surf porn or shop. It's not going to suddenly make them wake up and make them realize they have no ambition or prevent them from making stupid choices. At some point, people decided that most people are poor due to bad luck (hence that assinine 'less fortunate' label) Sure, luck can be a factor, but to suggest that it's the ONLY factor is an insult to those of us that worked hard to get where we are. IF we are talking about those people where it's only bad cards that are the problem, they still don't need the internet - they need a jobs program or an opportunity to succeed.
From a teacher's perspective, you have touched on the problem exactly. Teachers are not in charge of what they teach, politicians are. Politicians are not educators, and have no idea how to use laptops for teaching what is on their required achievement tests. Teachers know that their jobs are on the line and so test scores are the most important thing for them. Drilling for tests has been mandated from the highest levels by non-educators, and they are in the pockets of the computer companies, so of course they would love to see laptops everywhere. Until educators are in charge of education, there will continue to be a disconnect between the actual usefulness of a laptop for learning, and what takes place in a classroom- which is drill, drill, review, review. I love my laptop at home, but at school? Test prep from day 1.
Hmmm gee ya think that instead of wasting millions on tech we could spent more quality time with our children..ya know maybe that might help solve the social issues. When you have a child be prepared to spend the time needed to raise the child properly. DO NOT EXPEDCT THE SCHOOL SYSTEM TO DO THIS FOR YOU...
"The Brady Bunch is back...working homicide"
My school district shares a "dumb" (practical) school with several other districts, and people who actually chose to go there can be educated in things like how to repair cars, or build a house, or be a chef, or run a computer network, or whatever the other options are. It's a very dense yet high-priced suburban area (about 750k starting price on a new house on an acre lot, and almost every thing's half-acre or smaller, and only one of the other school districts is less wealthy), but people actually chose to go. And even more people chose not to go because it leaves so little flexibility: you spend half the day there, and the other half of the day is dictated by graduation requirements. For the kids who are almost certain to fail at least one class over four years, that precludes them from going because they'd be unable to graduate on time. (And often they're failing because they don't care about classes that legitimately won't help them. The kids whose parents own construction companies and who are being trained to help manage those companies care little for how to design a good experiment. Yes, they exist. So do the ones who work for their uncle at a local pizza shop and never need to write creative essays.) For the kids who are in honors/AP, it means they would end up in far more mind-numbingly easy classes than they're willing to put up with. And it makes it almost impossible to participate in certain extracurricular activities. So de facto, they're limited to only a part of the mediocre students in each district. And even with almost no emphasis placed on people going to the practical school, or anything done to make it easier to do so, that school is still successful. So I believe that if you make that kind of schooling available, make it convenient enough to be practical, and portray it as a valid and worthwhile alternative to academics and white collar employment, people will take advantage of it. Maybe it will never be the most prominent option, but in a society where schools are supposed to produce geniuses who don't know what a wrench is and are unwilling to lift anything heavier than a laptop, it would certainly be a worthwhile improvement.
Look, I love Linux and OSS as much as or more than the next guy, but jeebus people, the quickest way to show you don't know dick about image editing is to say that "GIMP Can Replace Photoshop".
It can't. It doesn't. Maybe it will someday, but we're about a zillion years off from that date.
I'm not talking about features, bells and whistles, the goofy UI (even WITH GimpShop) or even GIMP's laughably poor usability. I'm talking about basic core functionality.
Open GIMP for the first time. Where do you set up color managment preferences? You don't because GIMP can't do it. You're done.
Bring GIMP into a prepress shop. Open it. OK, how do you work in CMYK? You don't because GIMP can't do it. You're done.
Honestly, it's a really OK little program - particularly for free - for non-color-managed RGB image editing (which makes up close to 0% of my work right now), but really, it's just another in a neverending line of "still not Photoshop" programs that don't cut it for the real work.
Don't delude yourself that any app on the shelf can give Photoshop a run for its money as an overall image manipulation tool today. It's just not true. Photoshop is essential if you manipulate raster images for a living.
A book can last 20 years.
Or 50. I just purchased "Automatic Digital Calculators" from A.D. Booth, 2nd edition, 2nd print from 1957.
I think that all things relevant to computers have been thought about in the first ten years of electronic computers. All the rest afterward was either optimization, which could only be appreciated by people with knowledge in the field, or marketing bullshit, which is used to impress people without knowledge of computers, and to sell them things they do not need.
The problem here is that it is much easier to teach a series of clicks than to teach a concept. If you can use word, for example, how fast can you learn another word processor? Can you find out how to perform common tasks like paragraph formatting, header and footer configuration? Do you know how to leverage paragraph tags. You would not believe the resistance to abandoning hand-editing individual paragraphs. It's almost as bad as getting users to quit hitting enter at the end of each line, and having to strip out hard returns when they change their margins and the paragraph formatting goes wacky-bobo. Haven't had to do that in a long time, but you get the picture. If you understand basic concepts, you can easily learn any application that uses them. If you learn a particular app or os without understanding core concepts, you're hosed when faced with a different app or os, or at the very least you start at a lower point on the learning curve. And lest you thing the status-quo is going to be the standard forever, I would ask to see all the cp/m and wordstar installations still in use. Or wordperfect (which is sorely missed by people who really know word processing, but have been forced to switch to adhere to the de-facto standard, which is really no standard at all, even within it's own product line). I have found a great deal of functional improvement in microsoft's products lately (vista notwithstanding), but one reason I avoid them much of the time is that their products encourage this rote learning approach. They also tend to have a level of built-in incompatability with previously PUBLISHED standards, and appear to do so for the sake of limiting your choices to THEIR silo of products. At to that their byzantine licensing, not to mention outright arrogance, and you no longer control your IT environment. The VENDOR does. So, I avoid their stuff when I can, and use it when I have to.
Great, so now we see where OLPC is heading: five years from now, we will have a thousand times more spammers, scammers, hackers, crackers.
The only good thing about it is these guys will have no compulsion to go easy on Lunix and OS X. In fact, they will be the "low hanging fruit" in the new pecking order.
...that for some "pornography, cheating, and cracking" are actually educational. I learned a lot of my computer skills dabbling at such stuff. And I still turned out to be a upstanding citizen, eventually :)
I've worked in K-12 education in the states for several years and have seen a few one-to-one laptop programs. One middle school purchased laptops for over a thousand students. The same middle school had only one full time technology 'professional'. I now work for a corporation where we have at least one desktop support person per floor. The school district attempted to supplement their small IT staff with what they call TSGs (Not quite sure what the acronym means). TSGs are full time teachers who have shown some limited proficiency with computers and desire a few hundred dollars more per month for a few hours work helping other teachers.
Another problem is, when schools are given money for programs like this they are given very rigid requirements about how that money can be spent. Hardware and software only. This leaves the IT department with pools of money that they must waste before a given deadline. 'Ooh, let's buy a whole bunch of 1 year licenses for adobe products that no one will ever use'. One year later a teacher has a bunch of illustrator documents they can't open because their school doesn't have licensed copies of the software. That's only one example of the kind of boneheaded decision making and incompetence shown by most schools.
The IT people and administration had no understanding of networked computing. Their mindset was a throwback to the Apple II per classroom days. For example, instead of setting up an disk image server (They could've at least blown some money on Ghost), all laptops were imaged by hand by connecting up firewire drives whenever that laptop was flagged as being messed up. These were Macs, how hard is it to set up a file server and have the laptops periodically rsync. Let me repeat, 1 IT person. There was also no audit trail; IPs were assigned by DHCP with short leases and they did not have a database of MAC addresses. If a student did something inappropriate the school had no way to prove it. One teacher I knew even resorted to running ettercap so he could see what his class was doing.
Many of the entrenched IT people would never succeed in this field outside of the K-12 education world and are aware of this. They fight any attempt by outsiders and other teachers to make the technology better and view additions to their staff as threats to subvert their power. These people may have been able to tread water with one or two workstations per classroom but with a thousand laptops they quickly drown. The school administration felt that hiring some outside company to set up the initial image and then throwing money at Apple for support was all they needed. I guess they didn't understand that Apple did not have the school's interest in mind but only wanted to sell more Apple stuff. 'Gee, these iPods are cool. You can make podcasts of your lessons and have all your kids listen to them while they're going home'. One of them even had the gall to say that, 'Apple Remote Desktop would not be appropriate for their site'. Not appropriate, you can't have a thousand computers and manage them like you only have 30.
The problem is this. You need people to run these programs before they even start. Before you get the laptops, you need months to plan a roll out and set up images for your school. Hiring an outside contractor will not get you what you need because they are geared towards business, they do not understand the unique requirements of schools. I spoke to the director of technology who managed the only successful one-to-one laptop program I've seen. He said to me, 'I very quickly realized that the first thing I needed to do was hire a couple of UNIX geeks'. Amen.
Even using the inappropriate "survival in the business world" model, non free software is worthless to students because it's changed by the time the students actually enter the workforce. Mathematica is the only application on your list that might help students learn basic concepts, all the rest are worthless in school. School is a place for learning basic concepts. Familiarizing students with expensive software packages used for business purposes is a waste of both time and money. When it's your time and money, you can bore you kids with AutoCAD all you like, but don't expect me to pay for it or waste my kids time that way.
The software I mentioned is all concerned with learning. It was designed to presents basic facts and concepts in an interesting and interactive way. There are tools for rote learning and others for research and exploration. All of it is free and useful.
Honestly, I find it disturbing (if not downright pathetic) that someone would dismiss a product like Encarta (especially when it was first released) just because it comes from Microsoft.
There's very little honest about you, Bungi, especially your projections. I said Encarta was inferior to printed encyclopedias because it was and still is. They made if from a subset of Funk & Wagnalls, and modified facts to pander to different demographics. At the time, it was an interesting toy for those who had the money, but that money was better spent on other encyclopedias. Wikipedia, Google and free dictionaires leave it in the dirt so it's now irrelevant.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
If I had my way, schools wouldn't spend another dime on computers for the next four years or so.
The world you experience is only a close approximation of reality.
Here's another case study for you: Graphing Calculators. Or as one of my professors prefers to call them, "devil boxes" :D.
...but as for reading and writing, it's a bit different. E-books are a good idea but businesses think they're not profitable. And I don't expect textbook publishers are going to start using electronic versions of their books anytime soon. They're worse than the RIAA in terms of money, and I don't think they'd risk someone getting through encryption and illegally copying textbooks to one another, and given the price of textbooks it is incredibly tempting.
When I was using a graphing calculator in my Calc ABAP course, it was never meant to stand on its own: it merely acted as a way of illustrating the concepts we had learned from lectures. For a guy like me who is considered a visual mathematician, it was incredibly helpful. And it wasn't a laptop, either: the worst thing you could ever put onto it was a text-based drug dealing simulator. It only costs $90-$150, but the ones used at my school were the TI-83+ which never went above $89.95. The silver version had more memory and cost twenty dollars more, but it wasn't ever necessary. It was pretty nice because even though it provided us methods to analyze graphics and data, it did not let us do powerful things like calculate integrals.
My college does not allow the use of those items in the classroom, and while I can understand their sentiment that it prevents us from some hands-on learning, it just isn't the case. The computer science professors who teach mathematics courses mandate their students perform some of the calculations on the computer using either Maple or MATLAB! If I had those teachers for my calc courses I believe I would have done much better.
I've always believed that if a teacher had access to and skills with a slide show program like PowerPoint and a simple animation program they could do a lot to improve their lectures. You don't let the animations and words do the work for you, though.
Do you know the single factor, that without fail, leads to improvements in education?
Parental involvement. I don't care how much money, testing, standardization, or discipline you throw at a school, parental involvement is the only factor that consistently and significantly affects child performance.
Think about it - children learn by watching their parents. A lot of the biggest struggles in education in my area is with ESL kids. And, a lot of these kids have parents that quit school in 6th grade to work on the farm, and are telling their kids that they will do the same thing. Besides that, half of parents just sit in front of the TV vegging out all day, so how do you think that influences kids?
Don't blame our education system. Our society has problems that can't be fixed by low-paid workers who take a 3rd place priority AT BEST in the kids lives.
20 years? What was your high school like? I had a class in which the newest book I used was 25 years old! If taken care of, books can last a lot longer than 20 years. That's why E-ink and laptops will never take over.
Please put some pants on before you post again.
There is one significant advantage of computers over pen-and paper. They accept a wide number of possible interfaces, which make them useful for people who have various disabilities. I had a friend with quite severe dyslexia who simply wasn't able to proof read his essays on his own. When it started to become acceptable for us to use spell checkers for our essays he suddenly found his assignments no more difficult than the rest of us. Another of my friends have problems writing for long periods of time because of an injury. Speak to text software is obviously very useful for him. There is a lot of ways in which computers can help with learning, but it is important tor realize that it is a complement to, not a substitute for, competent teachers and a well prepared curriculum.
Asking a politician to fix anything is stupidity. Science will be our only savior.
The real issue with laptops in schools is ... what is the problem that the laptops are supposed to solve?
Support.
Its pretty clear that a student "needs" a computer, and being that laptops are somewhere about 50% of the computers sold today probably much higher than that for a college student, it would seem logical that having a bulk purchase of one model of notebook that should be a little cheaper for the student to buy than if they bought one on their own, and then the university can standardize and streamline their support system.
I'm not saying this has worked or is a good thing, but this is where the university is coming from.
You do realize, of course, that the first idea means that a teacher implementing the second is harming his own best interests ? Gee, I wonder if putting people into such a situation could lead to some corruption ?
Do you want your house's electric wiring to be done by someone who is lazy or inattentive enough to be sent to a second-rate school ? You know, the wiring where a single wire being connected to the wrong place could give you an electric shock or burn down the house ? Or the piping; you know, the thing where any leaks will rot the whole house ? Or the superstructure; you know, the thing which keeps the roof from falling on your head ?
European trade school system works because there's no social stigma against it. Your attitude - considering trade school a place where you send those who didn't make it in "real" high school - makes it clear that such stigma exists where you live. Yet a trade school is where you teach people who could actually get someone killed if they fuck up.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
My high school had that system too. A few of my cousins went to the trade school half-day to get EMT certified. I wanted to go get Cisco certified but my mom said that if I did that instead of staying in the high school with all honors classes, I'd have a tough time getting into college. I tried to argue since I wanted to go into a computer field anyway and this'd just be extra computer classes (my high school only offered visual basic and java for computer classes), but she wouldn't let me go. I didn't like that whole "graduation requirements only" thing that would result from going to the tech school. Then I couldn't take a foreign language and either chorus or programming classes every year. I had one year where I did a half-day, but I was in a community college for half-day senior year. The classes during the high school half of the day were all either AP or taught under the authority of the University of Pittsburgh for me to get credit that way. I'm a second semester college student and after next week's finals I'll have a first-semester junior's credit level, so hey that's a good thing. About parents forcing kids into college: yeah. My parents want me to be here. I would be fine with getting Cisco and Linux certifications and being a sysadmin, but I like programming and languages, and tech schools don't give you the room to move around and have 3 concentrations like I do. For kids like me, a technical uni (like Carnegie Mellon or MIT) is probably best. You get all the technological goodness and a nice geeky environment, but you can still pursue other non-technical areas of study. Unfortunately, I'm not at either of those schools because of location. My other major is International Affairs, and DC is sort of "the place to be" for that.
look! it's a bird, it's a plane, it's....a girl? yes, a girl browsing Slashdot on Linux
For all the problems of parents who actually attack teachers for mentioning problems with their kids, there is, in my experience, a more widespread problem of parents who do not care enough to take the time.
For example parents need to take the time with kids to:
learn to enjoy reading (read to kids, every night at bedtime until they don't want you to do it anymore)
learn the alphabet
learn their times tables
learn to read
make sure the kids are learning to organize their homework assignments and get them turned in
Parents show their kids what is and is not important, by example. If the parents do not place value on education, it's useless to expect the kids to place value on education.
Not necessarily. If the students are tested by someone other than the teacher, the teacher has incentive to actually teach. Students who aren't the academic type might prefer hands-on stuff to reading about the Bayeaux Tapestry. By "academic type", I mean nose-in-a-book. You know those teachers who know everything about everything and you can't figure out where they got it all? They're "academics." They live for learning. They also seem to be history teachers (and I see good reason for this--they know the history of practically everything). Some people would prefer to grab an erector set and build something. I'm a bit of a hybrid because I love books AND breaking/building/breaking things (yes, in that order, it's like reverse-engineering physical things), but most people seem to go one way or the other (the hybrids become engineering students). There are special art schools with no real stigma attached (more likely to hear something like "she'll be the next Mary Cassatt"). There shouldn't be a stigma about tech/trade schools either. Some people love technology but would rather spend their time as a sysadmin than a code monkey. The sysadmins go to tech school. The code monkeys go to uni. I don't really know much about trade school things that aren't technical because I'm not interested in them, but I recall commercials with stuff about nursing, so I'll use that as an example. Nursing is a good job. You get good pay coming out of school. You can get multiple levels of nursing certification at a trade school. If after a few of them you decide to go to medical school, you have real world in-hospital experience, and that helps. If the hospital you work in is attached to a uni, you might get a discount at the uni because you're an employee.
look! it's a bird, it's a plane, it's....a girl? yes, a girl browsing Slashdot on Linux
It's not like anyone with something resembling forsight could have seen this coming or anything.
I used to work in a school district that had a program that gave laptops to special needs students. Big mistake! The whenever the computers would have a problem the organizers would frantically bring them back saying "the student can't communicate without it!" so stop working on the crashed server and order the replacement cd drive for their computer. I can't even count how many times I had to clear spyware and porn off of the computers that the parents decided to take over, but locking down the systems would prevent the people that ran the program from putting on software that they needed, they absolutely refused to let us make an image of what the students needed. They also complained about the Office licensing constantly, when left alone they would install Office on every computer that they had from the same single license CD. I introduced them to OpenOffice, which they liked at first but then it suddenly had problems with the spell checker and grammar check...they had to add things like their last name, etc...just like in MS office and it didn't like the net-lingo grammar that they are letting students get away with writing these days. Sorry about the rant, but I've been saying from the beginning of the program it was a waste of time and money...especially when we are giving students better equipment to play games on when we have staff that are still using Win98 because the department doesn't have a budget to get updated equipment.
Two of our three daughters went through the local middle school's (in the Bay area) lap top program. Lots of parental involvement and only interested teachers participated.
- Two of the girls are straight A, one B-, we've seen no evidence that the laptops effected their grades either way
- Half of the kids participated at a parental cost of $1800 for three years (iBook + extended warranty + software.) The warranty was used by nearly every student, nobody designs a consumer notebook that can be carried by a 6th, 7th or 8h grader in a backpack for three years. Also, $100 of each participant was used to supply the computers for less economically capable kids. They standardized on Mac so that everyone would be on OSX, 802.11, same software versions etc. Wouldn't have been as easy if parents wanted to substitute their "old but still working Dell." A few MS fans refused to play.
- Hardship on the teachers is converting lesson plans they were using for 10-15 years to Powerpoint, etc., and making them interactive. This naturally selected out the lazy teachers and some really good teachers that are just not technologists.
- At least 20% of the kids are children of immigrants, many with the first computer in the house (unless a parent has an H1 visa with a Silicon Valley company.) At least they are one the technology treadmill with the rest of us.
- Even though the school made modest claims of improved performance, I personally don't think the first 500 students are statistically significant enough to draw conclusions for the long view.
- Our school district (20+K students) is now 95% online: grades updated daily, homework, schedules, etc. Every student makes Powerpoints, CDs, videos for classwork. The kids with middle school experience have some small advantage, but I don't think it makes them smarter. But they seem to be moe competent in the tools they will need for life.
Some of our experience:
- Middle school is a great time to become computer literate, its helps to have the education system involved.
- In three of the first five years there were a total of four "porn" anecdotes reported. The school routers blocked IM ports and also used porn filters, nothing installed on the kids computers so that they could be used at home as easily as school.
- It would be nice if we could economically ruggedize notebooks for kids
- 80-90% of parents would certainly do it again, knowing the results. Most of the rest got frustrated that the computers just couldn't put up with all the drops.
- It takes at least a small cadre of dedicated teachers to make it work. The school board could not have dictated this as a solution to some perceived problem.
Conclusion: it would appear that if you have a problem school (or child) and you GIVE them a laptop, then you still have a problem, it just now has a laptop. i.e. Computers are not a cure or solution to any problem, but they probably are a technology that it is helpful to become skillful with as early as possible.
* The CD-ROM textbooks (all three of them that actually came on CD-ROM) were all at least one edition behind the print variants, and had no provision for taking notes, highlighting, etc. What good is a biology text on CD-ROM if you have to lug the 10 lb book it was supposed to replace along with it?
* Internet references weren't allowed for either in-class discussion or as cited references in papers. Any paper that contained Internet material was an instant 50% (our version of an F). Reason? Nobody fact-checks Internet material (as all us Slashdot types have learned so many times).
* I don't know too many people who count using AIM, P2P clients and warez as a valid educational use of laptops. All of which became pandemic on our network within about three days of rolling out the laptops. Meanwhile, the kids who actually had a use for the machines couldn't because our servers crashed at least once a day as a result of the torrent of viruses, spam, etc being pumped out of hundreds of compromised laptops.
First rule of trauma: Bleeding always stops.