Well, maybe.

the Liverpool Central School District, just outside Syracuse, has decided to phase out laptops starting this fall, joining a handful of other schools around the country that adopted one-to-one computing programs and are now abandoning them as educationally empty — and worse.

Many of these districts had sought to prepare their students for a technology-driven world and close the so-called digital divide between students who had computers at home and those who did not.

“After seven years, there was literally no evidence it had any impact on student achievement — none,” said Mark Lawson, the school board president here in Liverpool, one of the first districts in New York State to experiment with putting technology directly into students’ hands. “The teachers were telling us when there’s a one-to-one relationship between the student and the laptop, the box gets in the way. It’s a distraction to the educational process.”

I'm curious -- is it really that "the box gets in the way"? Or is the problem (as at one school included in the article) an unwillingness or inability of teachers from to work with the technology? We had one teacher nursed along by the rest of us because he couldn't figure out how to use the online gradebook -- or his email. I can't imagine how Bob would have survived in a world where the text and assignments were electronic rather than paper. Could it be that we need to wait another 10-15 years before teachers are ready for the technology their students take as second nature?

Posted by: Greg at 10:14 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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