NY Times: Seeing No Progress, Some Schools Drop Laptops
This article dropped Friday, and most of the EduBlogs I care about have written about this topic. I think the most reasonable analysis can be found at:
Here’s the real bottom line:
What they all failed to mention, until late yesterday on Classroom 2.0, is that unless the fundamental structure of school changes laptops don’t make a bit of difference. If you’re riding a dead horse your only option is to get off the thing. And incase you haven’t noticed, we’re not just riding a dead horse, we’re riding the rotten carcass of a horse that’s been dead since Elwood won the Derby.
Even in (and perhaps because of) this recent anti-technology fervor, I fundamentally want to unroll a 1:1 program with my online school. Online schools don’t change everything, but they should, and they could, and if they don’t then what’s the point?
Here’s how my 1:1 program would work (based on 800 students):
laptops running Linux at $400 a pop: $320,000
usb drives: $16,000
Fon routers: $32,000
Yearly internet access: $32,000
1 IT employee to facilitate laptop checkin/out repairs: $50,000 (annual)
Total Start-up: $500,000(ish)
Students are each issued a laptop, a usb-drive, and a FON router. Students are given access to GoogleApps for schools and OpenOffice. Anything that they can’t save online (maybe even using X or GDrive), they save to their usb drive. If their computer takes a dump on them, they straight exchange it for another one. All of their data is on the usb drive or online, so the machine doesn’t matter. It’s hard to believe that downtime is part of why these programs are being dumped.
Over the weekend, I was exposed to a new song. It’s an old union hymn. It asks a simple question. One that needs to be answered as education technology is under attack. “Which side are you on?“. Do we continue what we’re doing while the world changes around us? Either you’re with us or you’re against us. No neutrals here. No more, “traditional school’s doing a good job with most of our students” rhetoric . No more. Come fight the good fight. The kids are depending on it.
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