[besson3c]

he 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.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/04/ed...mp;oref=slogin


This is not terribly surprising to me, but I'm glad to see the question of educational benefits outweighing politics.

This isn't to say that it is impossible to use laptops in a high school educationally, but I'm not surprised that many schools have had difficulty doing so, and I applaud these schools for pulling the plug rather than spending more tax payer dollars.

[highstakes]

Good call on this one. I'd rather get a student discount on a laptop of my choice from a university rather than being stuck with one brad of laptop.

[goMac]

At work we have a 1 to 1 laptop program, and we got this article forwarded to us yesterday (we thought the included picture was hilarious, look at the kids laptop and shirt for why). We're one laptop for every high school and middle school student right now, and next year we're moving to one laptop per student in 5th grade and higher.

Maintenance of 1 to 1 laptop programs is very difficult. Kids take the laptops home and break them there, which is something you don't have with traditional labs and laptop carts. This means every student actually has to take out insurance on their laptops, and without getting into specifics, the insurance company is certainly loosing a lot of money on us.

You also have theft to worry about. Strangely enough, the worst theft doesn't seem to be from student's laptops getting stolen by other people, but by student laptops getting stolen by other students, or by students committing insurance fraud in order to keep their laptop. Sometimes the parents are even in on the insurance fraud or laptops stolen by students. We also have students who damage their laptop, pay their insurance deductible, and then get the bright idea that because they've paid their insurance deductible, they can damage their laptop as much as they want before they send it in for repair. This usually ends with the kid taking a baseball bat to their Macbook in the backyard, and us charging the kid full price.

Another problem is just plain maintaining the software. The kids seem to think the laptop is their personal machine, so they want all their games and creative software loaded on. Which is good and all, but we really don't have the time to worry about that, and we gave them the machine to use for academic purposes, and not personal purposes. If they have non-academic related things they need to do, they really need to buy their own non-academic related machine.

There are also discipline related issues. Porn, hacking our security, etc. You might think we would give them an admin account, except because the tax payers paid for laptops to be used for academic purposes, we have to make sure that school district property is not being used for non-academic or commercial purposes. Honestly, we don't care much about games in general. But all we need is one kid loading some game that some tax payer will consider offense and we're in trouble. Also we lock down the machines so the students aren't as much able to screw them up. That said, you have students who find some hole we didn't plug and they go around "liberating" machines. The end result is they actually deactivate what we use to send out maintenance updates, and they cause trouble in the class room. We also don't need students clogging our network with file sharing.

Finally one of the weirdest things we get is family support requests. Some families actually use the laptop as a family machine, which is completely not what they were intended as. I mean, it's great that we're helping families get more exposed to computers, but often it's families who can easily afford a computer but decide they don't have to because the school gave their kid one. It's really annoying when we image all the laptops for the summer, and we get some family that was using the laptop to hold their family vacation pictures for their Hawaii trip, and they now want us to run file recovery software to get the pictures back. Sorry, that's not what the laptops are for.

Overall, it might be a wash. For some students it helps, for other's it's simply a distraction. That said, we're expanding our laptop program next year.

[goMac]

Originally Posted by highstakes 

Good call on this one. I'd rather get a student discount on a laptop of my choice from a university rather than being stuck with one brad of laptop.

I agree, but for public schools you have to guarantee equal access. Not all families can afford a laptop. But, this would solve the theft, insurance fraud, and software maintenance problems.

[besson3c]

GoMac: what has been the academic benefit of the laptops in your school system? Has your opinions on computers/laptops in high school changed since we last talked about this?

[tie]

This is not only unsurprising, it is completely obvious. A lot of people predicted exactly this. I don't have much hope for schools that waste money on tech toys instead of spending it on fundamentals.