Seeing No Progress, Some Schools Drop Laptops
There's been several problems with making laptops available for the students' personal use: they use it for activities other than school work, too much is being spent on repairs, teachers aren't always able to fit them into the lessons, and at one school "the network inevitably freezes because of the sheer number of students roaming the Internet" during study hall.
They hand out computers to try to make the students tech savvy but can't figure out how to keep the interweb tubes from getting clogged. If you know how many students you have and that they have study hall every other day, anticipating the use your network will have shouldn't be very difficult.
The most important reason that some schools are discontinuing laptop leasing, or deciding against beginning it, is that there was "no evidence it had any impact on student achievement".
The article does mention a few benefits from the computers but none that couldn't also be done with desktop computers in the classroom or computer lab.
Posted by marybeth at May 5, 2007 04:11 PM News