Laptop saturation projects
Steve Leitz (mspeko01@ll.kcts.org)
Sat, 13 Jan 1996 14:51:58 EST
EdTech participants,
First my question -- Do any of you know of a school that is involved in a
laptop saturation project in the US? I've read about ACT Academy in the
November Wall Street Journal special pull-out, but are there any other
American schools where all students grade 4 or 5 and up have a laptop
computer for their use during the school day (or all day)?
Why I ask --I'm presently working on a project that I suspect will be of
interest to some in this discussion group. Here's what we're thinking
about. In order to have an effective educational technology program,
efforts must be made to (1) accumulate enough machines so that teachers and
students have easy access, (2) build a strong infrastructure (software
libraries, networking, peripherals, etc.), and (3) provide on-going staff
development on how to integrate these powerful educational tools to enhance
learning. As long as schools have to fund all three of these components,
then we'll continue to suffer the "Alice In Wonderland" syndrome (sp?),
running (or spending) as fast as we can to stay in the same plance.
Technology moves to fast and we end up spending all our money replacing
outdated machines and very little educating our staff or building a strong
infrastructure. So, convince our communities that this must be a community
effort. If the parents provide the machines, then the schools will be able
to construct a powerful infrastructure and education their staff on applying
technology to enhance learning.
What I've seen -- I was fortunate to be able to visit several private
schools in Australia this past November and what an eye opener!! At these
schools, parents were participating in three year lease-to-own laptop
purchasing programs so that all the kids in the schools, grades 5 and up,
owned a laptop computer. There's not the space to describe in this posting
what I observed, but it was impressive, and in my mind, it was the future.
What we're working on now is developing a plan based on what we saw in
Australia that could be implemented in our public school system. Which gets
me back to my original question, is anybody doing this already?
Thank you in advance for those who rspond. MOre on our work later.
Steve Leitz Peninsula Public Schools, Gig Harbor, WA
fax # 1-206-884-5014
e-mail mspeko01@ll.kcts.org (the "ll" are two lower case Ls)