Any behvior management textbook would have told you that this sort of one-to-one program wouldn't work.

If you're doing a poetry magazine project, you don't issue a Xerox machine to each student in September and collect them in June. No: you make the machines available when the lesson calls for them. Otherwise, they become toys.

But schools need to have enough machines available on demand. That's the point. At my school, teachers fill up a year's worth of computer room sign out sheets in September. One room, 30 computers, for hundreds of students.

But if each classroom had a cart with laptops and other equipment, and if the teacher issued the equipment when the lesson demanded it, there would be no problem. (There's no problems when I do it, anyway -- I have access to such laptop carts through an Apple grant.)

Computers are like any other school equipment. If you were making posters in October, you wouldn't give them glue and scissors and glitter and paint in September, unless you wanted all that crap all over your classroon. If you're making movies in October, you pass out the laptops in October. And you collect them at the end of every class. (You might not even pass out the computers until the end of the lesson. You'll have them script the film, then storyboard it, then shoot it. Then you give them the computer to edit the video.)

Erin wrote:

There is theory, and then there is practice.

Or, in the eternal words often attributed to Yogi Berra, the 20th Century's greatest philosopher:

In theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they are not.

Clawmute

Trying to improve education by purchasing laptops is about like trying to start a factory by purchasing a random assortment of machine tools and hoping that they will magically organize themselves into a rational production process.

Michael Schrage, who studies technology and innovation, has some thoughts about computers in the classroom which I excerpted here.

Exactly, David, and it's no different than trying to improve education merely by providing students with textbooks or maps or libraries. It's the "merely" that's the key. Of course, you can't teach kids by throwing supplies at them.

But you also cannot teach kids without these supplies. (And a student who leaves high school without knowing basic html, word processing, spreadsheet management, online research skills, computer design, video and film technology, etc., is at as much a disadvantage as the student who didn't learn enough American history.)

Technology and supplies are not sufficient conditions for learning; but they might very well be necessary conditions.

"And a student who leaves high school without knowing basic html, word processing, spreadsheet management, online research skills, computer design, video and film technology, etc., is at as much a disadvantage as the student who didn't learn enough American history"..I don't think I agree with this. Why, for example, would the average person need to know about "video and film technology" unless they are planning a career in that field or they are interested in it as a hobby? Also, what do you mean by "computer design"--surely you aren't suggesting that chip design or even logic design be required courses in high school?...I'm guessing you mean computer-based graphics design?

By "computer design," I did mean "computer-based graphic design."

Skills such as computer-based graphic design and video production are increasingly necessary -- or at advantageous -- for all professionals. Business, education, management, law, medicine -- professionals of all sorts need to know how to assemble data of various media into coherent formats, and computers offer us many new ways of doing this.