Alabama Schools to be First in US to Get XO Laptop

CountryGeek passed us a link to a story in the Birmingham News, saying that schools in the Alabama city will be the first US students to make use of the XO laptop. The piece touches on a bit of the project's history, and seems to indicate the Birmingham school district is ready to make a serious commitment to these devices. "Langford has asked the City Council to approve $7 million for the laptops and a scholarship program that would give Birmingham students with a C average or above a scholarship to college or tech school of their choice. The City Council has not yet approved the funding. The rugged, waterproof computers will be distributed to students on April 15, Langford said, and children will be allowed to take them home. If a computer is lost, the school system can disable it, rendering it useless, Langford said. Students will turn in their computers at the end of their eighth-grade year."

Comments

Alabama, a thrid world country?

[4solarisinfo]

I don't recall OLPC allowing any of these things in the US, it was starting strictly in 3rd world countries wasn't it?

C average

[gEvil (beta)]

I thought a C meant that you were doing exactly the work that's expected of you (aka, Average). So now they're going to award scholarships for performing like you should? Crazy!

C average?

[CRCulver]

The opening up of the university system to all and sundry has already lowered standards and resulted in grade inflation. Just compare the rigour of an undergraduate education a half-century ago to the situation now where anyone (even me) can breeze through four years without a challenge. Is paying for college for people with a C-average instead of directing them towards only vocational training--as in many other Western countries--a good idea?

Re:C average?

[Dan Ost]

Unless, of course, you think that with the same grades and other performance measures, people who are poor should be kept out of college in favor of those who are rich. My own experience, as a kid coming from a poor family but with excellent grades and test scores, getting financial aid was super simple. It's the kids who have good, but not great, grades/scores that have trouble. Top schools compete for top students and will bend over backwards to ensure the top students have the means to attend. There are enough good students out there that the top schools don't have to compete for them.

Of course, a good student at a non-top school can very often be one of the top students at that school and qualify for grants and scholarships that would have been unattainable to them otherwise. Just one of the benefits of being a big fish in a small pond, I suppose.

Waste of money

[gasmonso]

Why on Earth do grade school students need to be issued a laptop? Early education should be about learning the basics. I remember not being able to use a calculator even in college Calculus classes as the professor thought it made people lazy and dependent on them. I do agree that schools should have computers, but every student?!?! Computer labs work just fine and cost a lot less than issuing every kid a computer.

gasmonso http://religiousfreaks.com/

Re:Waste of money

[explosivejared]

Why on Earth do grade school students need to be issued a laptop?

Isn't this a tired old argument already? I thought we had established what a useful tool that a personal computer had become for education. As a student from a rural area with limited educational resources, I can say from first hand experience with distance learning and paperless courses that PC's are becoming almost essential to education at the higher level. A good part of grade school education is priming children for the whole educational experience. Using the standard tools of the trade is only too obvious of an idea. I've always thought that the whole dependence on technology x was completely ridiculous. Technology is supposed to remove some labor intensive task. Tech is not making us dumber. The people that can only do math with a calculator probably wouldn't be able to set up an equation at all if calculators had never been invented. Tech + education == good for the most part. Note technology has to have some end. Throwing kids in front of a computer as a baby-sitting mechanism is not good. Allowing kids to have constant access to the tools a computer offers is a good idea.

Re:Waste of money

[Compholio]

I remember not being able to use a calculator even in college Calculus classes as the professor thought it made people lazy and dependent on them.

I had a Physics class where we were able to use Mathematica on some of our exams. Another school of thought says "your brain is only so big: use it for things that matter."

Re:Waste of money

[bcrowell]

Not all schools that are doing laptops are doing it with tax dollars. There are two public elementary schools in my neighborhood in Fullerton, CA. One of them (not the one my kids go to, thank god) tried to require every student to buy a laptop. A lawsuit resulted, and AFAIK the plan has not been implemented, but there are other schools that are trying the same thing.

Personally, I didn't mind buying $200 Linux desktop boxes for my kids, but standard laptops are a ridiculously bad choice for young kids. They cost two to four times as much as a desktop system with the same specs, and they tend to die or become obsolete much more quickly, so you end up with something that's an order of magnitude more money for the same amount of use. With kids, you just add onto that the fact that it will get beat on more severely. It's also fairly difficult to buy a laptop without paying the Windows tax, so most of these programs end up being Windows-only -- yech, yet more favored treatment for MS by government, None of my arguments apply to the XO, however; the price is low, and they're designed to be durable enough so kids won't destroy them.

As a physics prof, I can see both sides of the argument about the educational appropriateness of computers. On the one hand, it would be silly to require my students to do long division on tests. On the other hand, not all calculators are created equal. Some, for instance, can do algebra and calculus. I think there's a reasonable argument to be made that it's unfair for one student to use a $300 calculator that can do algebra and calculus, while the other student can't afford that, and has to get by with an ordinary scientific calculator. Personally, my experience is that the student who is incompetent at algebra is also incompetent at setting up an algebra problem on a calculator, but I don't think it's quite as clearcut a luddite versus non-luddite issue as you're making out. If you talk to calculus teachers about why students fail first-semester calculus, they'll all say the same thing: it's because they haven't mastered arithmetic and algebra. You also can't completely separate things cleanly into important concepts versus unimportant details of technique. Knowing how to divide fractions by hand isn't a completely separate skill from understanding what it means to divide fractions, knowing when you should do it, knowing how to interpret the results, knowing how the result would change when you changed the inputs, ...

Re:Alabama?

[cluckshot]

Cut the troll crap! Alabama is not a third world country though I must admit that Birmingham City is not Alabama's finest and brightest.

I live in Alabama. Nobody ever went to the moon without going to my home town first! We are the people who invented the "Green Revolution" that feeds the world. We are the ones who gave the world many amazing medical advances and we are the ones who have some of the finest and brightest the world has. Alabama is a fine state and isn't even the 49th out of 50 economically either. We are doing much better than most of the USA. Yes we have paved roads, good schools and we have running water too. Actually it may surprise the bigoted idiots out there but Alabama is actually one of the most accepting and welcoming societies on earth so we are not even the racists some people think we are. We are one of the centers of computer technology and manufacturing for the world. We are one of the technical leaders in energy, genetics and much more.

To be blunt Alabama is a very nice place with a lot of very bright people and a lot of very nice people. As long as you are somewhat civilized the people of Alabama welcome you and treat you well. Every race finds that this is so. The state has one of the strongest and faster growing economies of the USA. It has a lot to recommend it. I think we should be proud that XO laptops begin to spread in Alabama. Learning is for every kid.

Re:Alabama?

[cerberusss]

That's pretty funny you should mention that. I'm in the business of (amongst others) hosted virtual machines and the smallest plan has 64 MB. People sometimes ask me, "What can I do with such a small amount of RAM?". When I basically answer "everything, but you might have to tweak some config files and heavy scripts", they're very surprised.

Re:Alabama?

[Anonymous Coward]

> As long as you are somewhat civilized

, heterosexual, and Christian...

> The state has one of the strongest and faster growing economies of the USA.

As indicated by what?

Yes to XO laptops; No to dome stadium

[cabalist]

I live in Birmingham, AL and think that it is a great idea to be equipping our children for life in the real world. Mayor Larry Langford's efforts, to this end, should be lauded.

On the other hand, and there is always another hand, this particular instance is a shell game. Birmingham (and sadly Alabama in general) has been the victim of poor leadership and frequent deception. In this case newly elected Mayor Larry Langford, formerly mayor of a nearby, poorer, decaying locality, rented an apartment in Birmingham (but never lived there) in order to become eligible to be elected in Birmingham as mayor. He has been pushing a dome stadium for years (10+) believing that he can attract a professional football team(never NFL, mind you) and turn Birmingham, AL into a tourist attraction.

In order to do this he wants to raise sales taxes on everything (food and necessities included). This is a regressive tax on the poor and uneducated who will not enjoy the fruits (if there are any fruits) of their taxation.

He has been trying to pass this for years and now he thinks he has it.

Birmingham cannot let him distract them with the XO laptops under the right shell when there is a dangerous, expensive, disasterous dome stadium under the other one.

Laptops=good idea
Dome stadium/Birmingham as a tourist destination=WTF???

cabalist

Re:Hey Paw, I got a C!

[cayenne8]

"Don't sound so elitist. It's a good thing that a college degree is a common feat. "

But in a way....it is lowering the standards, just like we're doing in so many other areas. With a college degree, this cheapens it. It is pretty much already the case that todays college bachelors degree, is the equivalent to the HS degree of a few decades ago. In the past and bachelors pretty much ensured you'd get a good paying higher level job. Now, a BS or BA is the minimum requirement for almost any job besides riding on the back of the garbage truck.

Rather than lower the standards to "C", and having to teach remedial courses in college, why not start earlier in high school, to encourage learning the basics and getting those A's and B's.....so they can be ready for higher learning.

Re:What does this PC actually provide them?

[tfoss]

2) Teacher's unions. Do you have any actual evidence of this being a major problem? I know it's a lovely scape-goat particularly for political opponents of unions, but that doesn't give the argument any validity. In fact the researcher's who've tried to look at this say there really isn't enough data to make a conclusion one way or another. Further, charter schools (sans unions) have shown no improvement [warning:PDF link] in student performance.

3) School policies that don't allow proper discipline for disruptive students.
4) A legal system that actually listens to parents who sue when schools properly punish their kids for misbehaving. Not sure, but it sounds like you are suggesting corporal punishment?

5) Government monopolies that make it financially impossible for most parents to afford to send their kids to private schools or homeschool them. I'm not sure I understand how Gov't provided education makes private schools charge prohibitively expensive rates.

-Ted