Following a link to my blog from Stephen Hall at Tech Waves I unearthed a rather strong opinion against the idea of 1 to 1 laptop projects in the US. His post “Laptops are a costly Mistake for Schools” gave a me a good dose of reality just as I am on the brink of finalising our first step in this direction. I was curious to read articles here and here, that clearly illustrated the potential ills of such projects on such a wide scale.
Nevertheless I am determined that our approach is different, as I commented, we do not have deep pockets nor are we going to only measure standards after a year and say it was a failure or a success. We know from our own experiences that such projects are much more complex and often have unplanned impacts.
It was good to read a reply by Dennis Harter to these views and I truly value the variety of opinions that are so easy to access via our blogs. It helps so much as a subject leader to hear these comments and debate such real issues borne of real experiences.
Some of the main differences between many of the US models and our own is:
- Age of the children – I work in a primary school, so problems evolving from a growing technical expertise within the student body will be limited.
- Scale – we will be beginning this project with only 40 odd machines, no doubt this will stretch some of our resources, however it is not in the realms of 1000’s of machines to manage. Lessons we learn from this will help to shape the future of the project.
- Focus – For a long time my headteacher and I have been saying that we want more choice for the children when it comes to technology. So that they eventually will be able to choose the most appropriate tech for their own learning. I believe our measure of success may be different to many of the US schools cited in those articles.
- Access – in many of the articles there were huge ramifications from allowing machines to go home. For us the laptops will remain in the classroom for those children’s use. No sharing, no trolleys the responsibility for them will be the teacher’s and the children’s. As they will not be leaving the site we will hopefully reduce accidental damage and other related incidents.
With 3 quotations currently in my possession the next step for me will be to meet with my headteacher and discuss the details and what follows.
Thanks for the link to my laptop posts. It’s a timely issue right now and one that has generated good discussion. This type of conversation is ALWAYS a good thing. If we can’t defend our thinking then our position is unlikely justifiable.
One thought I had with primary kids…are you going Mac or PC? The Macbooks are significantly tougher than the typical PC laptop. Sure you’ve thought of this, but thought I’d comment on it for your readers to consider who are in a similar position as you in their schools.