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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.
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.
(1) eBook readers have to be of good enough quality to be an acceptable replacement for paper.
(2) Text sellers have to actually sell their eBook versions for significantly less than their printed paper copies.
Part (1) is all about the quality of the resolution, and general display. Right now it sucks. ePaper, or eInk, or whatever they call it, shows real promise in this area, but it's still very new. Part (2) is actually the harder one. There's not too much point in this if a printed dead tree copy is as cheap as an eBook -- students can fork over the cash for the heavy version and scrawl in the textbookm themselves; it wouldn't be quite as good as the eBook option, but it would narrow the gap sufficiently. If, on the other hand, eBooks are signficantly cheaper (as we would reasonably expect them to be) then there's enough good economic sense behind moving to eBook reader devices to properly motivate it.
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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."
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Here I was, thinking that giving someone with a Grade 3 reading level, a Grade 2 writing level, and an ego regarding their abilities which can only be attained by someone who has learned nothing of substance in the past 5 or so years, a laptop which requires excellent reading ability and desire to learn from, and excellent writing ability and desire to communicate with the outside world with...
You know what? It's just too ludicrous. You've got to have fundamentals before a laptop and the ensuing internet access is of any use, and even then, they won't help with anything they'd be teaching in any sort of school where you're not expected to buy your own laptop if you need one.
We started a one-to-one laptop program at a pilot middle school for our 7th graders. The biggest problem is the driving force(s) behind the program are only focused on the laptops. These people are not educators or technicians, they are politicians of one stripe or another. They don't realize that the price of the laptop itself is the *least* expensive item.
The teachers that were thrown into the program were like "Cool, I get a new laptop...", and that's about where it ended. They were worse than clueless when it came to using computers for even the simplest things, let alone how to properly integrate a laptop into their teaching environment and curriculum. Of course, they "budgeted" training into the project, but it amounted to about 3 hours of general computer familiarization. This is just enough time to make the computers the "focus" of the classroom (a distraction from learning) instead of an integrated learning tool. Giving every student a computer makes sense only when you change your teaching methods at a fundamental level. This requires a deep understanding of many facets of computers and computing; something today's teachers just don't have and colleges don't teach yet.
This is still ignoring the infrastructure aspect. There are the obvious things like having enough wireless access points to handle 100 computers within a close cluster of 3-4 classrooms (non-trivial - especially when the plan calls for "two airport extremes to provide wireless coverage" - yeah, what are you going to do with the other 80 laptops?). Then there are the racks of spare batteries and battery chargers that will be needed. Students will *not* show up to class with their laptops charged and you *cannot* have power cables stretching across the aisles. These high-speed chargers are expensive and so are the batteries.
Students now *require* their computers for every class - not just for "computer lab". This means that they *have to have* a computer with *their* data on it. If something breaks or gets corrupted they can't wait for several weeks to have their computer repaired (we have a 1,000-to-1 computer to technician ratio). This means that OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) work orders get priority and everything must be dropped to get a replacement to them (with their data on it). Expecting students to properly back up their data is a lot to ask. Making this a priority part of the educational process is apparently impossible (since the teachers don't even really understand it). Making sure that all the important data, settings, etc. are backed up in such a way so that transferring them to the stand-in replacement is quick and seamless is not impossible. It just becomes difficult deciding what to backup. How important are the 10 Gigabytes of iMovie projects? What about the 20 Gig of MP3s in iTunes or the Garageband projects? Assuming that some of these are legitimate and must be backed up, how do you do that over (totally saturated) wireless? Then where do you put that data? You can't put it in an accessible part of the file server - kids will be messing up their backups... Now you pretty much need a dedicated backup server with a huge amount of storage (which also needs to be backed up) to constantly be online.
Now we have to deal with damage and loss. It gets up to -70F in t
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