In Maine, a laptop for every middle-schooler

Why isn't the educational benefit of using a a laptop measurable? Perhaps because there isn't any. If students won't open books and read them, why will they do educational things on a laptop? I have taught courses that used specialized calculators to "enhance" learning and the students won't take the time to learn how to use them. They also seem to feel they are in school because they have to be, not because they want to learn anything.

The problem in the classroom today isn't lack of technical tools. It is the lack of motivation, for both student and teacher, and poorly educated teachers that put us behind the rest of the world in education. Do the countries that are beating us so badly in educational achievement have this policy of laptops for students? Or do they simply have better teachers, more concerned parents and more motivated students?

I hate the idea of computers taking over the teaching in the classrooms. I feel that they skip important fundamentals that children need to learn. A good example would be if 20 years from now we have a major computer crisis and nobody knew how to figure mathematical problems by hand. The world would just stop. As it is now children do not have a clue how to do the simplest tasks such as counting back change and the sad thing is these are high school graduates..

I don't believe in "teaching to the test". Let's look beyond the test scores for the answer. The ability to test well is hardly a true metric of how well a student has or has not learned. Some students can take tests and do well with no study while others have to study for hours just to squeak by, yet in a non-test environment those others do quite well with the materials. Laptops will help the younger students learn skills which are ever more important in high school and college and finally in the business world. That part is worth the consideration of providing the equipment.
Perhaps the cost of the program should, like student loans, be based on financial ability and scaled accordingly.

I currently run a computer donation program in a medium-sized school district in Florida. We are privately funded and work to provide low-income students with computers in their homes. We also face the challenge of proving whether the program is actually helping standardized test scores and student achievement. I have spoken with many of the parents whose children have received the computer, and they noticed an increase in the student's grades after having gone through our training and receiving a computer. This is qualitative data, but valuable nonetheless. Our main goal, like the laptop initiative in Maine, is to prepare students with "21st century skills" in the upcoming workforce. I am interested to hear if there are other programs in the country that focus on providing equal access to technology to students, and if so what means have these programs used to prove their effectiveness.

I graduated from a school in Minnesota that had computers on every students desk. The school is the Minnesota New Country School it's known for discovering deformed frogs in 1995 and for getting millions from the Bill & Melinda Gates foundation to replicate the school nationwide.

I did have better test scores when I went to a school that didn't have the computers, but I learned skills that I actually use and that in the real world nobody really cares how you scored on those tests (they are used to determine the funding for the school).

By going to this school I was able to start my own successful business (selling information on the internet) and have now have been able to become semi-retired (I'm 22). Having a computer helped me out a ton and I feel that in the real world more of today's students will be using computers on a daily basis than reviewing a test score from 7th or 8th grade because quite frankly those test score results don't matter once you graduate.

comments1-5 are IMO all on target, When I see my grand kids whiz by me on computer skills and operational talent I can be nothing but pleased. At the same time I think interaction away from computer access to be valuable also as in#1 You have to be able to function without one also. Glad to see this important topic come up as it is and will become more so a issue society will have to deal with. Eventually a lack of fundamentals will be a deterrent in our children getting ahead

I think that the only way that a student should get a laptop is high-school and up. Also their should be content protection on the laptop. Porn. is easy to get to and if not taken care of will end up in the students heads. Also with a laptop, kids don't learn skill that will be needed in the future. As a student, I am free to say that I learn better with a teacher, a book, and a pencil. I also think that with laptops, student will be able to talk to each other with MSN or send E Mail instead of doing what they need to do. Books may get out-dated and the kids may not pay attention every now and then, but a laptop could allow them to bully with laptops and then if kids store personal and a "friend" tells someone else their password, that would be very bad and unlucky for that person's info. But hay, I'm just a student.

Four years ago, we chose to move to the Kutztown School District in eastern PA because they are part of the Apple one-to-one technology initiative (yes, hometown of the infamous Kutztown 13). With one child who just graduated, one in high school, and the other in middle school, I have to say we are extremely satisfied with our decision to choose this district.

By the way, we do have dozens of families in our area who are old order Mennonites (kinda like Amish- horse and buggy farm folk). When I stopped at the farm stand this morning, the the Mennonite girl who rang me up was wearing her little bonnet and a long dress. She had to step away from her Macbook to wait on me.

Face it, the world embraces this technology. I am thankful that my children are going to be able to compete.

It is not a question of whether laptops are beneficial to learning. It is a question of whether children are being given the opportunity to learn the computer skills to integrate themselves into a fully wired society.

Computers are what the military calls "force multipliers." In other words, if you take a task and computerize the process, you can now outdo your competition with some combination of faster, better, cheaper.

If done properly, this will always provide a potential advantage to the computerized player if all other factors are equal.

Today's job market requires advanced computer skills and you don't acquire those skills without computers. Monkeys without trees don't learn to climb trees. It is that simple.

The world has advanced from writing on stone to writing on paper to writing and communicating digitally. Some people don't like that, but it is undeniable fact.

My mother died at 94. At 93 she would still drive to her bank and make deposits in person and only at her own branch because she said, "They knew her and knew where to keep her money." She could never understand that her money is thrown into an anonymous pile and that the banks business is just a continuous flow of electronic 1s and 0s.

You can argue about the ability of computers aid learning. I happen to think they do. You can't argue about the fact that the world is computerized and there is a compelling need to be intimately familiar with computers to have much influence on the world around you.

An earlier comment asked what would happen if at some future point there was a world wide computer crisis. That is the same as asking what would happen if on a certain day all the paper in the world burned. In the 60s someone set a fire at a Veterans record center somewhere in St. Louis and hundreds of thousands of records were permanently lost. Things like this happen.

Also, if we do have this worldwide computer crises and we don't have a critical mass of computer literate technical specialists to deal with it because a group of Luddites decided introducing computer skills into our basic educational system was not effective.

Folks the world changes and just as it has been for millions of years, those who can not adapt to change move to the bottom of the food chain.

The first thing educators and politicians who control our educational system have to do is face reality. Computers are an integral part of modern society and modern business. To control your place in society and business requires the ability to use computers to your advantage.

Computers are only as smart as humans. If someone made a computer the computer is only as smart as the person who made it. If someone is smarter then the person who made the computer, they are then smarter than the computer.

Regarding msnbc's question "In the 21st century, should all students get their own laptops? And if so, should the school system pay for the laptops?"

High school students should all get laptops to use in school and at home. Middle school kids should all have them AT LEAST at school. Elementary students should have a laptop at every desk.

Technology and computer companies should provide their goods and services to schools at a great discount. (Apple does for our school) These companies should, however, have to bid on contracts to allow them to service a district for an alloted time. It's a win-win situation for everyone involved. How? Our district uses Apple computer products, so it's no mystery why my recent graduate got a Macbook for her off to college gift, even though she was first offered pc products.

There's a lot of discussion on the Chinese Olympics being a great wide open frontier for marketing. This is a great opportunity for industry and education to co-operate IF we can keep the fatcats away from the cookie jar.

Computers in the classroom are a must. The amount of training and type of training offered varies greatly from one computer program implementation to the other. Herein is where the biggest problem lies today. There's a fine line between multi-tasking and being distracted - and not necessarily by unproductive material. I find this to be true for myself when attending meetings at work. Something in the meeting will spawn a thought and before you know it I've spent 10 minutes engrossed in exploring that avenue of thinking only to find that I've missed an important 10 minutes of the meeting. Teachers and students alike need to be trained on how to strike an attentive and productive balance with the computer at their fingertips. Incorporate that skill into the computer training agenda, and you'll be sure to have trained up a generation very well equipped to manage through today's digital age.

Oh, and don't get me started on the pitfalls of measuring students via STANDARDIZED TESTING!!!!!!!

Computer operation is not a handy skill to have. It is a basic skill, just like reading, writing, and arithmatic. To go to any college, to have any job, you have to have some computer skills. In the future it will be more and more so, not less and less.

To prepare children for the rest of their lives it is essential that the computer is second nature to them.

Having said that, it is about time that the FCC took away porn like they do on TV. In order to access porn sites, you should have to pay. The Porn part of the internet should be portioned off to only be accessed through payment. It is the only way to screen it. Some children will still have access, but it will be a lot fewer. Porn doesn't do anything positive for society anyway. If it can't be portioned off, get rid of it. Make indecency illegal. Simple enough...

Greetings All,

Just wanted to throw my two cents in. As a high school history teacher of nine years in a high need urban district and a Graduate adjunct professor of Language Arts Instruction I can summarize my thoughts in a few sentences. New Literacies, multimodality and technology are a necessity in education in the 21st century. However, they require high caliber professionals facilitating the process. One would never argue that if the pen was too fancy and techie to be used in the classroom. The pen, like the computer is an instrument of composition and teachers need to see them as that. When used in correlation with good teaching and as constructors of meaning rather then rote memorization tools, computers can put any pen to shame. New literacies does not seek to eliminate traditional literacies but rather support and expand upon them as to allow students with all of the necessary social and political tools to express meaning in authentic and powerful new ways.

Respectfully,
Keith Hughes
Social Studies Team Leader, McKinley High School
www.hiphughes.blogspot.com
CVCV Lead Instructor
www.cityvoicescityvisions.org
UB Adjunct Professor of New Literacies

In Henrico County in Virginia, every student in the 6th-12th grade gets his/her own laptop that is taken home and brought to school every day. I am currently a 10th grader from this district, and throughout my middle school and the start of my high school career, I have had the use of a laptop. There are multiple pros and cons from this. In class, teachers are able to teach in different ways with the use of the various applications that the students have access to via the computer. However, from my own personal experience, some students choose to use the computer to play games, etc. instead of using the computer for its intended use, and the computers sometimes have mechanical problems.

I believe that if they are used the right way, computers can definitely be a fantastic asset to the classroom when it comes to learning the material and in classroom discussion. Coming from a school district that has had computers for every high school student since 2001 and for every middle-schooler since 2003, I have had a personal school computer for much of my school career, and I have found it to be a wonderful learning tool because computers offer more ways for the teachers to teach, opportunities for different types of projects to be created using the computer, and many more qualities that would have a positive impact on any student's school career.

In Henrico County in Virginia, every student in the 6th-12th grade gets his/her own laptop that is taken home and brought to school every day. I am currently a 10th grader from this district, and throughout my middle school and the start of my high school career, I have had the use of a laptop. There are multiple pros and cons from this. In class, teachers are able to teach in different ways with the use of the various applications that the students have access to via the computer. However, from my own personal experience, some students choose to use the computer to play games, etc. instead of using the computer for its intended use, and the computers sometimes have mechanical problems.

I believe that if they are used the right way, computers can definitely be a fantastic asset to the classroom when it comes to learning the material and in classroom discussion. Coming from a school district that has had computers for every high school student since 2001 and for every middle-schooler since 2003, I have had a personal school computer for much of my school career, and I have found it to be a wonderful learning tool because computers offer more ways for the teachers to teach, opportunities for different types of projects to be created using the computer, and many more qualities that would have a positive impact on any student's school career.

It brings me fond memories of my school, when we first were introduced to computers. My last year in elementary school, we were treated to the first PCs (actually, they were Macs) to ever have been installed in the school's history. It was a small room, with about 5 stations. But with that small step, I looked on into the future with great expectations.

The next year, at our new school (middle school) my friends and I all got to enjoy being at a school that was fully online, in every classroom and whose library was more sophisticated and streamlined for the deditcated bookworm. This was 1996-1998, so nothing was wireless and everything moved at sluggish 23kbps internet speed that clearly didn't allow for much browsing. I remember the librarians having to come to each of our stations to reset or close down a system that for all practical purposes was just "wating for the mail".

It's unfortunate that everything great must have such humble beginings, for now in this day age we have come to see great leaps in technology. Conveniences that just weren't there during my childhood. But I feel all the more compelled to see this revolution take place. Let the product of the efforts of these great minds be that THEIR succeeding children will be driven to succeed. And so on to further generations. They will have all the more power to keep that drive in full force so long as we support their efforts and make them ready for the coming challenges.

I did my work with a paper and a pen.
It is important to be computer literate, but more important not to teach a reliance on technology that can fail you. What's more - spell check is going to create a nation of kids who can only spell when the computer holds their hand.
There's no reason for it. It's not that hard to just take notes on pencil and paper, hell, I still do taking my degree in university.

Computers are just a tool, like an encyclopedia, a cash register or a hammer. The more tools you're taught to use, the more you are capable of trying. That's the important thing. Knowing how to use a computer becomes more critical every day. Calculators didn't make me forget how to add, they just made me add faster.

Administrators are always in love with the latest tool or technique. They are notnecessarily bad but we are already so far behind in academic ,competence ,discipline,self control, work habits, antisocial and disruptive behavior. It does not take 16 years of schooling to learn how to use computers, most have them at home, town library friends and school. This will do nothing to stop the huge slide america is on compared the other developed and developing countries. Learn math by doing writing by reading and practice writing, science by books and experience, some research is best done on computers , but if we lose the basics by getting distracted by shiny toy we are lost. Ps. I love computers and as an adult bought my own and learned everything I needed to to use it, But I still know math without calculator etc

My school district started 4 years ago w/ laptops for all High School Students. My son's class were freshman at the time. It did not take long for the students to figure out how to get around the blocks and locks that the school placed to keep them from downloading programs or going to websites that were not approved. The laptops did open up new learning methods. The most helpful was that some of the teachers placed their lectures on "Blackboard" Many times though we caught him playing games when he said that he was doing homework. (he wasn't quite quick enough to flip the screens).

The biggest problem with the laptops is when they malfunction and have to be returned to the technology center for repairs. The shortest time my son's was there was 5 days (according to him an eternity) the longest was 2 months. They do not offer loaners while the laptop is being repaired.

The district is moving the program to the middle school this year and my daughter will be participating. We'll see how this goes.

I don't think every student should be given a laptop each. I am in favor of the use of ICT for education. Among the many reasons why students should use ICT as part of the learning process is because it is envisaged that the future workforce will be knowledge workers who will be able to get the information and who need to be able to connect with others to complete tasks. ICT literacy therefore becomes important. However, students should also be made to work together because that same workforce of the future (if not already that of today), are expected to collaborate with fellow workers in the office or other stakeholders across the globe. Sharing laptops will not only cut down on costs but also makes sense from the learning point of view because students learn to work together. Teaching teamwork and collaboration therefore becomes a conscious effort.

And another thing. I know Apple has great software and laptops. I have no intention of starting a flame war here about how good Apple is. I am willing to accept it is good. But I think schools all over the world, especially where funding is always a problem (which is almost everywhere), schools should switch to Open Source Software (OSS) where the software is legal and free. This will save a lot of money. No worries about upgrading costs and so on.

Some may ask then what about the many educational CDROMs on Apple and Windows formats? Most of these will be unusable on OSS. But remember these CDROMs also costs money. Multiple user licenses for their use are not cheap The computer literacies that I mentioned above do not need students to know proprietary software. With the savings from software licenses schools can focus on buying cheaper laptops with the very minimal configurations to run on OSS (like LINUX) and give them access to the internet. Furthermore, instead of using Blackboard, which is expensive, schools should switch to the free OSS called Moodle which is gaining rapid popularity. All you need is server space which has become very cheap. It would mean a shift by using only learning resources found on the Net or by putting all learning resources on the Net on a server somewhere. It is definitely cheaper than using proprietary software. Remember most schools don't have access to free (or cheap) Apples (or Windows).

I'm a student who lives in westchester county NY and i go to a private school and i used to go to public school and was advanced extremely in my classes so i always was sent to the computer to learn lessons for middle schoolers in the 4Th grade. i learned so much more than i would sitting in a class that i already knew what they were teaching . the private i go to uses both books and computers in the classroom. we aren't issued laptop because most of us have computers and the combination of this helps us realize what the real life is like and how you used books for a a lots of basic learning but the use of computers of advance learning and practical use. I have seen much improvement in my school once my schooling fully supported computers in private school unlike the public school i went to and that computers allow a student to learn at their level not the level of their peers.

It's worth noting that the text books allocated to each student usually cost between $60 and $120 each. If a student has 8 classes that's easily $800 worth of text books that a district must provide to each student. The Maine program spends $600 per computer for each student, and all the text books are kept on the computer's hard drive.

Thus, the cost of the computers can at least in part (if not completely) be justified by the cost of the text books the district would be dolling out to each kid.

Additionally, schools save on the expense of photocopying handouts, since these can be published and distributed electronically instead. All homework is turned in electronically, further eliminating the expense and waste of paper. Submitting and recording all of a student's work electronically also ensures that the dog can't eat it. Kids can't claim that it got lost, and they can't hide their grades from their parents, since parents can view electronic progress reports on-line in real-time. Gone are the days where mom and dad don't realize there's a problem with how their child is doing in school until receiving his report card every 6 or 9 weeks. Now, parents, student and teacher can all be on the same page, thanks to electronic progress reports, electronically published assignments, etc.

These new tools in education more closely match today's workplace. By engaging students in this format of communication, information and interaction early, the skills needed to work in this environment will be second nature.

Furthermore, there's absolutely no basis for the argument that a 1-1 computer program in the classroom results in established, basic skills being sidelined or bypassed. If you read the article you would have seen the mention that spellcheck is actually helping students become better spellers. Having a computer on the desk does not mean that a child will not and need not learn long division. It also doesn't mean that kids will no longer put pencil to paper. Kids can't make change anymore because this skill simply isn't taught. I'm 32, and it was only briefly covered around third or fourth grade when I was in school, and back then no one had laptops. The people making these arguments that kids will become too dependent on computers for handling basic skills for them are simply ignorant of the technology and how it is being used in the classroom. Read more about it and *educate yourself* on how computers can enhance the learning process and promote cognitive development

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