More on laptops

Last week, Education Post had a follow-up to the story about Renaissance College and laptops (School rules that laptops must stay in class).

As English Schools Foundation schools launch plans to require students to buy and use their own laptops, a school that gave students computers has reversed its decision after several were damaged.

Kiangsu-Chekiang College's international section in North Point gave each secondary student a laptop - funded by school fees - when the school opened five years ago.

The computers remained the property of the school but parents had to agree that they would be responsible for repairing any damage.

While no computers were stolen, headteacher Jane Daniel said a few children damaged their computers by dropping them, including one student who broke the screen three times.

Ms Daniel said this contributed to the school's decision to keep the laptops at school and have students bring their work to school on memory sticks.

"There were one or two people saying: `Technology has moved on, is there any need for them to be taking their laptops home every night?'" she said.

Most parents surveyed by the school said they would prefer to buy their child a memory stick rather than be responsible for a laptop.

This week, they published a letter questioning the usefulness of memory sticks (Complex endeavours can't be done on a stick):

I am curious to know the professions of the parents referred to in "School rules that laptops must stay in class" (Education Post, October 14), who suggest that taking a memory stick to school would be as effective in creating authentic, student-based learning as having a laptop for each child.

All the professionals I know who are engaged in intellectual pursuits such as engineering, architecture, teaching, graphic design, etc use specialist software for the sort of complex tasks that they work on each day. To suggest that they can simply carry a flash disk with them and use a shared computer from a bank of workstations would be considered insulting and would show a lack of appreciation for the needs of creative professionals carrying out intellectual tasks.

If you think that schools do not have equally complex and specialist software or that children are not capable of learning complex software then I invite parents to ask their child to show them how they use a drawing package or other complex software that adults take expensive courses and invest lots of time in yet children seem to master very quickly.

Comment: Personally, I have found it possible to work on multiple computers and transport files on a USB drive, though I agree that it has some disadvantages.