School swaps textbooks for laptops

The AP article on MSNBC states:

TUCSON, Ariz. - A high school in Vail will become the state's first all-wireless, all-laptop public school this fall. The 350 students at the school will not have traditional textbooks. Instead, they will use electronic and online articles as part of more traditional teacher lesson plans.

Vail Unified School District's decision to go with an all-electronic school is rare, experts say. Often, cost, insecurity, ignorance and institutional constraints prevent schools from making the leap away from paper.

For the record, and I've stated this before, I do a lot of learning off of paper, because I haven't found many adequate ways to do that same learning online. So I find it difficult to accept the notion that there is a need or a justification to make a "leap away from paper".

"The efforts are very sporadic," said Mark Schneiderman, director of education policy for the Software and Information Industry Association. "A minority of communities are doing a good or very good job, but a large number are just not there on a number of levels."

What criteria does the Software and Information Industry Association use to determine whether or not communities are doing a good job? Are they measuring the output in terms of graduating students performance, or would the industry association be measuring the dollars that the community pays into the industry? I might be naive, but I thought that generally industry associations are there to promote the growth and profitability of that particular industry.

Calvin Baker, superintendent of Vail Unified School District, said the move to electronic materials gets teachers away from the habit of simply marching through a textbook each year.

Don't blame the teacher for the bad habit of simply marching through the textbook, blame the textbook. Replace the textbook with a computer. Now your uninspiring teacher is going to simply march through a list of websites while half of the class surfs Starpulse.com or IM's each other.

It's not clear how the change to laptops will work, he conceded. "I'm sure there are going to be some adjustments. But we visited other schools using laptops. And at the schools with laptops, students were just more engaged than at non-laptop schools," he said.

The more I read that article, the less I'm encouraged. It doesn't really sound like they've done their research. They're charging ahead, tossing the books, spending hundreds of thousands on laptops, and they're not clear how the change to laptops will work.

They're justification is based on a vague notion that, at other schools that they visited, the students appeared to be more engaged.

All of this brings back memories of the first few chapters of Dr. Jane Healy's book, Failure to Connect, in which she describes the enthusiasm of people in the software industry to get their software into the school systems and the blind faith mixed with glee that educators have regarding getting the kids onto computers. They are thinking, all the while, that the learning is now going to automatically happen thanks to all of the wonderful technology. Meanwhile the kids are really getting very little out of it.

The article didn't go into enough detail to answer all of my questions, so I wonder:

Have the teachers undergone special training in how to teach with this new medium?

Who's going to train the students on how to effectively use these tools? How much time is that going to take away from their regular curriculum?

The article cited that the laptops will cost $850 for each student, while the text books ran $600-700. However, a laptop is analogous to a book that's full of blank pages. Where does the content come from? You must now buy software and pay for online content providers to let them use their services. Software typically costs more than the machine itself.

How much is the network infrastructure going to run the school, to keep these $850 laptops connected?

How many IT professionals is the school going to need to hire to maintain the networks, laptops and software?

At any one time, how many students are going to be without the use of their laptop because of hardware or software failures? What about damage from carelessness? When the laptops decide to be ornery and not work, how will that disrupt the learning experience? When hands are raised, will it be "I don't understand the solution that you just showed us, can you go over that again?" or will it be, "I can't connect to the network, and I'm getting an error at 0x034FDEE4 in KERNEL32.DLL."