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South Carolina To Give 1 Laptop Per School Child
ruphus13 sends in an OStatic article outlining the plans of the state of South Carolina, inspired by the One Laptop Per Child project, to provide laptops to local elementary school children. "The South Carolina Department of Education and the non-profit Palmetto Project have teamed up to get a laptop in the hands of every elementary school student in South Carolina... The OLPC/SC hopes to distribute as many as 50,000 laptops this spring to eligible students. The effort is underwritten and managed by the Palmetto Project, whose mission is to 'put new and creative ideas to work in South Carolina.' While low-performing school districts with limited resources are a special focus for the OLPC/SC, the group is adamant on one point: There are no free laptops. In order to receive a laptop, children need to give a small monetary donation — the project coordinators say a dollar or two is sufficient."It's not obvious from browsing around the OLPC/SC site what software the XO laptops will be running; but by following links one gets the impression that they will be powered by Linux, not XP.
They're giving laptops to "low-performing school districts with limited resources", but surely to actually use those laptops in lessons, the schools will have to spend even more of their limited resources setting up an infrastructure and new teaching plans?
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
I admit to liking the idea of requiring a donation so the laptops aren't completely free. It is well known that you value the things that cost you more then those that don't.
However I am still left with the unsettling feeling of why give laptops to children? The US has health problems because kids aren't getting out and playing and instead sitting in front of video games, TVs and what not and we are going to give away laptops? I understand why kids should be exposed and be familiar with computers but shouldn't the elementary schools be focusing on the basics such as reading, writing, arithmetic and learning to be social at such and early age? Give them the computers when they are older and hopefully more responsible.
Maybe I'm just naive and old but I have yet to hear a good reason why children need laptops.
Can we please drop the Balmer throws chairs joke?
Go green: turn off your refrigerator.
Why? What is the point? Do they have any evidence indicating that getting a 9-year-old to make a promise will in any significant way improve his life?
Go green: turn off your refrigerator.
I'm a big fan of laptops replacing textbooxs in the poorer regions of the world where kids cant get the books, but I dunno if it makes much sense in this situation.
IranAir Flight 655 never forget!
"Hey mom, could you give me a hand updating my kernel please?" On an equally serious note, will they be disallowed to use WINE until they're of legal age?
"Can we please drop the Balmer throws chairs joke?"
No, just don't read them if you are offended.
Some of the schools in the "Corridor of Shame" are falling apart so badly that they have to beg private companies for basic furniture. The education department should at least get the basic facilities of the schools functioning before they start getting this extravagant. There are schools in the lowcountry that still don't have air-conditioning (in a state where it can get into the 100's, and a wet heat to boot) and have holes in the classroom walls you can see daylight through.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
I got an XO second-hand from someone who had bought it from the G1G1 program, thinking she'd be getting a cheap, full-sized laptop, and was extremely disappointed.
I gave it to the kids and they absolutely love it. They use it for playing around with the paint program ("activity"), some music stuff, etc., Not exactly the "learning" experience a school kid might have with it, but at least they'd rather play with the computer and explore than watch tv.
Frankly, I'm *glad* it doesn't have XP on it; my 4 yo figured out how to do stuff on the XO without having to ask. It uses metaphors that a kid "gets". Do I care she's not "learning what she'll need in the real world?" Can you imagine still hitting the "start" button to do something in twenty years?
Plus I don't have to buy an anti-virus program to install it it. :)
see, when i was in school i had to learn math and science and english.
your (or anyone's) children can still do art, play outside, even walk in the woods if they had a computer. the computer aids in normal class time (the three R's, etc) it does not replace recess.
Looks like we've gone from throwing money at the problem to throwing computers at the problem.
Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
Parts of South Carolina(and other areas of the US) are in the poorer regions of the world where kids cant get the books...
I'm not sure why this was modded as Funny. The first thing I thought of when I saw this article was all the poor families that are going to sell the laptops as soon as Junior brings it home.
Howdy, I do IT work for a fairly rural school district in SC. There are so many problems with this idea I don't know where to start.
Firstly, we've just recently had our fired/not fired meetings owing to the current budget crisis. The idea of giving up to 50,000 laptops to school children is noble, but the money would be better spent retaining teaching positions that are either being cut or lost due to attrition. I realize that's an apples-to-oranges comparison since this is more of a grant, but the truth is that most school districts are flooded with initiatives like this, Title 1 funding, etc. that can only be used for very specific purposes. Priorities need to be examined and these programs need to be reorganized. Federal funding is great and all, but it doesn't make much sense that a network closet that 20 computers run back to has 10 brand new switches in it while the school can't afford to retain its current teaching staff.
In addition to that there are a ton of infrastructure problems that need to be examined. Most schools in the great state of SC (and, I assume, most places) were built before the advent of widespread computer adoption in education. Power is a major issue. All the sudden the room that really only needed power to a TV and maybe 4-5 computers now needs to have the power capabilities to also handle 20-30 laptops as well. This is not to be underestimated.
How about network connectivity? Are we going to install network jacks in these classrooms for these laptops or put in WAPs? Who is going to pay for this new equipment/cabling?
How about all of the volume licensing agreements? Agreements for OSes, anti-virus clients, patch management systems, etc. are all done by volume. Who is going to pay for the additional licenses for these systems?
Maintenance? Is the grant going to give us enough spare laptops to cover for children while they're laptops are down for repair, students who forget laptops, etc? What about the increased workload of an already-thing IT department covering the additional laptops that will, in all likelihood, break more often?
And as for the Linux? I'm a FOSS advocate, run nix at home, etc. But you have to realize that *most* school/district IT departments are staffed by folks who were the most technologically proficient users at the time the equipment was installed, e.g. the librarian who knew how to install MS Office got promoted to be the head of the district IT department. Sorry, but supporting (or even running) Linux for a lot of these folks is over their heads.
Is all of this worth it to give young students laptops? Will this really foster that much additional learning?
Don't get me wrong, I think it's great that someone is trying to promote the technology. Unfortunately there are a lot more pressing matters to take care of in SC schools and a lot of issues to tackle before this could be successfully implemented.
I know this is a bit of educational heresy but some subjects just aren't
that dynamic. The "tragedy" of having old textbooks is not really that
severe. Even stuff like "recent events" history could be covered by
supplementary materials.
Punctuation rules and the laws of motion don't change that much.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
in California we keep having to get new textbooks to meet new government regulations. But this is the price we pay for legislating social re-engineering projects.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
"Howdy, I do IT work for a fairly rural school district in SC. There are so many problems with this idea I don't know where to start"
..
:)
:)
Countries in the developing world such as the African nation of Rwanda don't seem to have any such problems. As neither does Brazil.
"it doesn't make much sense that a network closet that 20 computers run back to has 10 brand new switches in it while the school can't afford to retain its current teaching staff"
Retraining FUD
"All the sudden the room that really only needed power to a TV and maybe 4-5 computers now needs to have the power capabilities to also handle 20-30 laptops as well. This is not to be underestimated"
I thought laptops ran off of batteries
"How about network connectivity? Are we going to install network jacks in these classrooms for these laptops or put in WAPs? Who is going to pay for this new equipment/cabling?"
The laptops utilize mesh networking so they can still provide functionality even without a central gateway.
"How about all of the volume licensing agreements? Agreements for OSes, anti-virus clients, patch management systems, etc. are all done by volume. Who is going to pay for the additional licenses for these systems?"
There are no 'volume licensing agreements', the XO isn't susceptible to such things as viruses
"I'm a FOSS advocate, run nix at home, etc"
You sure sound like it
Maybe Miss South Carolina would be an advocate of using the XO. I grew up and was educated in South Carolina and it is a unique place. I had the opportunity to build an IT infrastructure for an urban district. Some of the kids would skip breakfast for the opportunity of free time on the computer. These aren't for people that have technology at home. If only 5% of the kids that get these laptops improve their lot in life it is well worth the cost (50K laptops at $200 is only $10 million). Do they have the infrastructure or teacher training to take full advantage of this? Probably not. Will innovative teachers and good, but poor parents take advantage of this? Definitely. Why doesn't everyone help? Go to laptopsc.org and give $5 dollars. If you live in SC volunteer some time to build the infrastructure. Sure you'll have to buck the bureaucracy, but try.
That's true. When I was a kid my mom gave me a bunch of old textbooks from my grandmother (1940s), and I devoured them. Frequently my teachers or classmates would ask, "How on earth did you know that?" For example: "How did you know the alternate name of white blood cell is corpuscle???" Well. I read it. Things haven't changed that much, especially in the areas of biology or astronomy. And math and spelling is identical. Having an old textbook certainly is not ideal, but it's not a tragedy either so long as the student is learning.
Contrast that with a laptop. Will a laptop given to a 4th grader today still be any good when they graduate (2018). Heck no. That would be equivalent to me graduating this year with a 100 megahertz/ 16 megabyte machine. You'll end-up spending thousands of dollars trying to keep your students up-to-date with new machines, and poor schools can not afford that.
Governments keep throwing money at the education problem, and lack-of-money is not the problem. It's equivalent to a patient coming to me and saying "my head hurts," but instead I start stuffing her pockets with dollar bills. The problem is not being addressed.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
I think it's obvious that they don't understand what it means to provide an education. Just because you give kids some technology doesn't mean that they will be any more effectively taught than without the technology. In the end, these laptops are just a tool, and if the schools and teachers are not prepared to effectively use that tool (I doubt they are), it will all be a big waste of money. This is just another case of people having this idea that computers run on fairy dust.
How can you provide an education on technology without providing the tech to the student? How can you be considered educated in a technological society without learning to use the technology? How can a society participate in the global market without citizens who understand technology?
The technology is both the tool for learning, as well as one of the subjects. Sure you could learn all your other subjects with decades old textbooks, but not how to use a word processor, spreadsheet, web browser, file folder system, etc. It's not that computers magically make teaching better, it's that we need to teach students that computers don't run on fairy dust, and the only way to do that is get them comfortable with using them.
Write your representatives! Repeal the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics!
I think it's much worse.
Two problems: digital data is *much* more compact than paper and your searching ability is limited to the index.
I have an 8 GB pendrive, which is by no means very spectacular these days, but a King James Bible has about 5 MB of data. Have you ever tried carrying 1600 bibles in your pocket?
When in doubt, I google for an answer, or look into wikipedia for a clue. How do you index your paper books? Before the internet, I used to look it up in the Encyclopaedia Britannica (again, a BIG volume of paper), but too many things do not have Britannica articles.
If you think from a very limited viewpoint, paper books are OK and are much better than illiteracy. They are better than computers in many aspects, reading in bed, they do not need batteries, are easier to annotate, you can dogear them. I do have a big "dead tree" library.
But paper is no substitute for a computer. I think we must learn how to extract the most intelligence from both media, the ideal learning environment would be one that has both paper and digital data. Let's keep the printed books, but don't belittle the worth of computers either.
While I agree to a point about old textbooks (Here in parts of rural AR some of the books are literally falling apart from age and wear) I really don't see any reason why the laptops given today can't stick with the student until graduation, especially if they are running a low resource Linux distro so they don't have to run the ever increasing bloat of antivirus/antispyware. Remember, what we are talking about here is basically using these laptops as textbooks with updatability. It really doesn't take much horsepower to draw text and static images onto a screen. As long as they have in the contract a steady supply of spare parts for things such as failed screens and batteries there really isn't any reason why they can't be using these in 2018 EXCEPT...
If they are running MSFT Windows. Before anyone screams Linux fanboy I have been building and repairing Windows boxes for nearly 15 years and it is all I use at home. but even I will be the first one to admit that for an uneducated user(and we ARE talking about kids here) that the need for antivirus and antispyware apps will quickly suck up more and more resources until the laptops simply aren't usable. Now an educated user who knows what they are doing can run quite old hardware without getting an infection, therefor they don't need that much. But as someone with a couple of kids of my own I can tell you no matter how hard you lock it down they WILL end up hosing a Windows install. So unless these things are going to be locked down so hard all they can do is open up a browser they really need to be running a really low resource Linux, like DSL or my favorite for older hardware Puppy. I have slapped Puppy on ancient 233MHz boxes and it makes for a pleasant Internet experience.
So if they have thought ahead(this is public education so I doubt it) and used a low resource Linux install there really isn't any reason these kids couldn't be using these laptops in 2018 short of hardware failure. it just takes a little planning and forethought. But knowing public education they are probably running XP Home which means it won't be long before the machines are pwned or so bogged down with spyware they just won't be useful.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.