Laptops

From Saturday's Education Post - Laptop plans sparks concern from parents:

Plans for two English Schools Foundation schools to have students bring their own laptops to classes have sparked concerns among parents over whether children should be responsible of carrying such expensive machines every day.

Renaissance College plans to have each secondary student bring a laptop to school within the academic year and South Island School is considering introducing a similar programme next year.

But some parents were worried that students, especially those in the lower years, might not be able to look after a laptop, said the chair of the Joint Council of Parent Teacher Associations, Sarah Rigby.

"Is it reasonable for the children to have that pressure to look after the computers? I think the school has to really prove to parents that it's necessary for them to have them," she said, adding that computers could be accidentally left in places such as school buses.

Ms Rigby said families with two or three children in secondary school would have to spend a significant amount of money.

"On top of that parents will have that lingering doubt of what happens if one of them drops it in the first week." she said.

South Island School parent Mary Mason said she worried children might lose their laptops and be targets for theft, particularly when they attended after-school activities with students from other schools.

She suggested students carry computer files on data storage devices, such as flash disks.

Comment: I think I would agree with the concerns raised. and the last point seems worth considering - you can carry around all the files you need (and even the Operating System) on a USB drive and plug it into a PC as required.

The other interesting issue is whether or not it is a good idea to ask students to use laptops in lessons. My initial thoughts were that it could be a very bad idea, but now I'm not so sure.

I have been in plenty of meetings and some training sessions where most of the participants have laptops, and my observation is that they can really distract people. Answering emails, sending messages, and reading websites can be much more attractive than listening to whoever is speaking.

However, I realize that things do change with enquiry-based learning, and perhaps the teacher becomes more of a facilitator, helping the children to discover things for themselves. I'd be interested to know whether that really works or not.

However, I wonder whether Peter Kenny is getting a bit carried away:

Having their own laptops would let students take advantage of podcasting and record lessons to help them review their work, he said. "Students don't have to be next to each other to collaborate on assignments or be in the classrooms to access teachers," he said.

I doubt that would work, because if you are sitting at the back of the class the microphone would pick up so much background noise that the recording would be useless. The obvious solution here is that the school records the lesson and makes it available for download as an MP3 file. This would also mean that laptops could be switched off so that the students could concentrate on what they are being taught.

As a parent, I'd like to know a lot more about how laptops would be used, and what can be done to ensure that they really are useful.