This post's inspiration comes from an article in the Wall Street Journal and posted in the post-gazette.com's education section in August 2006: "Saying no to school laptops."
The article begins with the tale of a mother in California who decided to pull her daughter out of a laptop program when her standardized writing test scores fell and she became more interested in sprucing up her MySpace page than doing her homework.
The author also outlines the costly nature of these 1:1 programs and some of the different ways school districts are funding them. The big names in computers are ready and waiting to play ball with these schools as the profits can be lucrative, not to mention the fact that "caputuring customers as teenagers creates strong brand affiliation."
Parent concerns such as the wrong skills being emphasized-incorporating all the bells and whistles, but skimping on content, and the ever present safety concerns of spending increased time online are also addressed.
While I've seen a lot of information on the pros and cons of the 1:1 initiatives, it has come to my attention that what is felt to be one of the largest problems with the program at my school is the unreliability of the laptops themselves. They feel the program may not be able to continue because of this. Now, I don't want to start a family feud, but these are Apple laptops and were purchased in 2003. I just switched from a Dell to an iMac last spring and I couldn't be happier. However, some of the grumblings are that the Apple laptops are not "sturdy" enough for this kind of use. Any thoughts? Any true "techies" who can give me an unbiased opinion? Perhaps this is the next are I should look into..any suggestions on where to look?
4 comments:
Hi Ann, this is Joe (TA) -
I wouldn't classify the macbooks as 'flimsy'. I have my own anecdotal evidence, but I asked someone that does 1:1 laptops in his school about his experience. They have 50 laptops that are used 1:1, 20 in a mobile lap, 55 in the hands of teachers, and 3 for their specialists. They have lost three to bad hard drives, one to spilled water, and one to a broken screen. The spilled water and broken screen were at the hands of teachers. So not a single student has broken a computer. Keep in mind that this is still just one school, but it is a fairly typical Florida elementary school (Title 1 - 78%).
If you have questions about 1:1 in action, I'm sure my friend would be willing to answer some questions, you can email me at jgreaser@gmail.com to get in touch.
I have another comment...
Jobs and Dell recently came out against teacher unions. Are teacher unions starting to speak up against 1:1 laptop and other school technology initiatives? I'm wondering if there is any connection.
Ann, during my first full year of teaching in 2001, I taught eighth grade. We had forty students in the entire eighth grade, and two teachers for these students. We also had a mobile laptop center that contained twenty-five second generation ibooks to be shared amongst the classes. At first, they could not be taken home. By the end of the year, we had about seventeen working laptops. Why did eight fail? I don't know the precise reason, but I have my ideas. I don't think it was because the laptops weren't durable. I had one for teacher use, and everything on it worked fine. I enjoyed using it, although I was never a MAC person, so I had to learn all the quirks I wasn't used to.
Ours failed because they started letting students check out the computers, and these laptops had cd burners. In 2001, my students were amazed by this. (Now, my fifth grade students can download and burn cds before I can say copyright infringement.)They came back with copies of their friends cds (since most didn't have internet access) and broken computers. The cd drive doors were broken and some cd drives wouldn't even pop back in.
In the end, they stoppped letting students check out these computers, and they disabled the cd burning capabilities. Misuse was the fatal flaw.
It seems to me that the flaws in this program are the same flaws that happen to all great theories: humans. In theory, communism sounds great to many; in reality, it would never work because people would never allow it to work. If even one person bucked the system or went astray, the system would collapse.
It has happened throughout human history. There was a time when doors were the things that kept the elements (and certain unsightly animals) out. Now, because people learned that other people sometimes walk in and take things that aren't theirs, most everyone locks their doors.
In my own school district, a school servicing low socio-economic students was part of a pilot program that gave each student a laptop that they could take home. Within a week, students walking home were being robbed of their computers, or, in some cases, parents were selling the computers to buy food, pampers, or alcohol and drugs.
This is the unfortunate side of human nature that creeps into and often ruins even the best-laid plans. Does this mean all such future initiatives should be scrapped? Not necessarily. What I think it does mean is that serious, possibly non-politically correct conversations must be had before going through with costly programs such as those we have discussed.
If a child's mother can't afford to buy milk, why wouldn't she sell a laptop given to her What can the school board do, ask her to pay the money back? With what?
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