Want A Laptop Program In Your School? Careful What You Wish For
Posted by arvind s grover Mon, 10 Apr 2006 00:00:50 GMT
As a technology director in a laptop school people contact me from all over the world to ask questions about our program. Our school was a very early program (1997), and remains one of only a few girls schools with a laptop program.
While you are thinking about all the glamorous things that can come out of a laptop program, let me give you some of the least glamorous tech support cases I have seen:- Keyboard not working. Remove the keyboard and find some fake fingernails underneath. Reattached and keyboard worked normally.
- Cat tears apart student laptop by ripping all the keys out and scratching up the entire inner case. Obviously needs a new keyboard, but the cat’s hair is inside everything.
- Student eating sushi, working with laptop – you can imagine, but soy sauce on a motherboard just doesn’t work.
- Repeat example above with : water, coke, diet coke and iced tea. (students and teachers)
- Student takes out emotional frustration on laptop with expired warranty – family had to buy a new one, that hurts.
- Just last week: sheepish student comes to tell me that someone threw up on her laptop! Everything corroded on the inside. Thank goodness for Dell Complete Care warranty.
These are all true, so if you are thinking about a laptop program at your school, buyer beware. As someone in my office noted, what kind of laptop party was that kid at anyway?
Technology in schools creates amazing opportunities for learning, but the practical is, well, just that…practical.
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Arvind,
Great post. Laptop programs are high maintenance. The benefits are great but it takes a lot of effort to make it all work. When Gary Stager spoke at Mohonk two years ago he said laptop programs are easy and you should all be doing them. Well I agree we should all be doing laptop programs because they are good for students and for our future, but they are not easy. Nothing of lasting value ever is.
Fred
Hey Fred, thanks for stopping by and adding to the conversation. I also agree with Gary, but I think schools need to know why. I think that is one of the hardest thing for schools to understand.
“But our students are doing great.” “We love our curriculum.” and then of course all the negative reasons like, “Laptops do not provide a large enough return on investment.” “It is just a distraction for students.”
And all the rest…people who start programs seem to focus on logistics and not on curriculum and pedagogy. Once you have the ideology lined up, the technical can follow.
What do you think?
When you teach a child to read you open up a vast world of potentially distractive information.
If distraction is our concern perhaps we shouldn’t teach children how to read.
We do, of course, teach reading because we fully understand the value of having access to the vast amount of information available via print.
Access to information leads to wealth, power and even wisdom.
Because personal computers, especially laptops, are such a recent development many people still don’t understand the value of having access to the vast amount of digital information available via a networked computer.
They will eventually, though, because access to information leads to wealth…
This only covers information acquisition. We could also talk about information organization, information manipulation, information creation, and information distribution. All of which can be facilitated by using a networked computer.
Great and needed post Arvind!
Could you (or Fred) share info. how to accomplish video projects using laptops. Is it safe to stick with the desktops on this? Or, (in the future) do you see laptops being able to handle higher end applications? What cannot be accomplished with laptops? is probably where I’m going with this.
Thanks for the info. Amy Bowllan
Hi Amy,
I can speak for Mac laptops, which even at the low end can be used for digital video editing. When you go up to the MacBook Pro that laptop can do virtually anything you could do on a desktop system. We have lots of kids doing digital video on their laptops (both Macs and Windows) and the quality of their work is getting better as the tools steadily improve.
Fred
Amy, even with laptops that are a few years old, I have seen students create pretty impressive short digital videos/movies with only Windows Movie Maker and a digital video camera. With more powerful tools, there are more paths the kids can head down.
The processors and memory is growing fast, but so is what’s possible. With high definition cameras and editing software now available, I am not sure how the PC laptops would hold up, at least the ultra-portable ones we use. Kids could certainly get into the editing/creating process, but the higher-end kids would love the dual-core PowerMac G5’s with Final Cut.
Take a look at my long-ago post on video resources here: http://www.21apples.org/articles/2005/03/01/lets-make-movies
Amy, there are a number of services now letting you do web editing through the web. So maybe my argument for needing a desktop is not quite valid. There is a list here: http://tln.tc-library.org/index.php?q=node/39
Thanks for this (Fred and Arvind) We use Visual Communicator (from Serious Magic) and it’s very difficult to use on laptops (PC). It might be the quality of laptop we’re using. I will definitely check these links and I really appreciate it. I’m teaching Broadcast Journalism and want to have the capabilities as the Carlsbad HS in Calif. You should check out what they do with video. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CHSTV