Larry Cuban of the Stanford School of Education has published a short article titled 1:1 Laptops Transforming Classrooms: Yeah, Sure. In it, he repeats his argument from Oversold and Underused that classroom computing initiatives have not significantly transformed American classrooms.

In higher education, where students willingly choose to attend (in K-12 they are compelled by law to go to school), where students have already achieved 1:1 computing capacity, teachers and students mainly use these powerful machines to reinforce existing ways of teaching and learning.

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I have no doubt about this. But I also recall from personal conversation with Larry that his argument says more about the profession of teaching in general than it does about laptop computers in particular. In his Stanford course The History of School Reform, Larry Cuban and David Tyack repeatedly drove the point home that American schooling has been incredibly resistant to change for at least a century. Different school reforms -- bigger, smaller, more vocational, single-sex, magnet, gifted and talented -- have hardly changed the typical American school.

What does Cuban's perspective on schooling and technology imply for those of us working in one school? First, let us remember that Cuban recognizes the transformation of other activities by technology -- communication and research especially. You could attempt to justify a computing initiative purely on these grounds. Next, let us ground technology initiatives within the space of other changes in schools. Just as a school might consider adopting a block schedule, starting school later in the day, or eliminating AP classes, school leaders should carefully consider the match between technology innovations and pedagogical theory, the time and energy required for teachers to change practice, and the amount of social capital one possesses within a group of professionals to make such a change.

Cuban estimates that only five percent of teachers considerably change their practice in the presence of new technologies. If we want to better that mark, then let us keep our heads screwed on straight when pushing for new technologies.


tags: laptops,, k12

Jim Heynderickx nicely summarizes the core purpose of his middle school's student laptop program.

For students, laptop computers are cognitive tools. They provide computer-mediated workspaces for the rapid, flexible processing of symbolic representations and abstract concepts. In addition to aiding the process of learning (research, discovery, communication, composition, revision), laptops also support the creation of products (reports, graphs, maps, images, video, web pages).

NCCE Low Stress Laptop Program Handout

Our Board has asked me to distill our argument for student laptops. Here are some notes (in rough form) to support that effort.

Student laptop programs have the greatest direct impact on students. The keeper of the laptop is the one most transformed by its use. Individualization of usage patterns is a constant in high school faculty and student laptop programs. For most people, the greatest impact of laptop computers occurs outside of the classroom. UHS teachers use their laptops the most in their offices and at home. Only 15% of UHS students bring a laptop computer to school for use during or between classes.

A laptop is an essential tool to manage personal information in a technological world. Our faculty laptop program shows an extremely high degree of user satistfaction.

Students find it inefficient and frustrating to manage files among multiple computers. Files are frequently forgotten, corrupted, and lost in transit via disk, email, and USB storage device.

Less than half of our students share computers with other users at home. They sometimes report difficulty getting enough computer access in the evening. Other students have unfettered access to their own computers. This isn't fair. (I am going to distribute a new survey to seniors this Friday to gain further resolution on this question. Would it be disingenuous to correlate this data against student GPA? I could get the data to do it!).

Email remains the #1 killer app but has limited potential when users check their new mail only once per day. The ability to instantly reach teachers and students throughout the school day and during classes amplifies the efficiency of email.

Web-based social networking tools are rapidly becoming the new technology literacy. Blogs, forums, wikis, and eLearning are making conventional technologies obsolete. Leading companies such as Apple, Microsoft, and AT&T are furiously releasing new, web-based products to catch up with this trend. Blogs and wikis have completely supplanted web page editors as the dominant online publishing tools. Blogs have broken the word processor monopoly on writing environments. Flickr and Google Earth are becoming leading tools in the domains of photography and geography.

Given this new reality, regular accessibility to the Internet is essential in order to be a powerful user of new Web 2.0 tools.

The definition of information literacy has changed. We grew up learning how to locate hard-to-find information on specific topics. Our students are learning how to evaluate and filter great quantities of information on specific topics. Immediate access to information and filtering tools is a great asset in this search.

I am currently attending the Urban School Laptop Mini-Conference. Attendance is most impressive. There are about 80 people in the room, and Howard (Urban's tech director) has taken the innovative step of requiring each school to bring one lead administrator. I have to believe that part of this new wave of enthusiasm for 1:1 laptop programs is the accelerating popularity of Web 2.0 technologies.

The content is not new to me, having heard Howard and other laptop evangelists speak before. However, I am pleased to hear directly from Saul Rockman, who has conducted a series of laptop program evaluations, and a member of the Lausanne School in Tennessee, which hosts the leading annual laptop conference in the United States.

Both Saul and the teacher panel provided me with some nuggets for my most present concern: how to convince non-teachers (e.g., board members) of the quality of classroom transformation that takes place with a laptop program. A teacher's personal theory of effective instruction is (usually) complex and deeply held, and each teacher will selectively adopt aspects of a laptop program to suit his/her objectives. This reality does not sit well with individuals who are being asked to approve or reject a program that will cost families thousands of dollars.

Our strategy is to answer the trustee's questions as well as we can. Let us describe the ways in which classroom instruction will likely change as a result of laptop implementation, stressing the long-term timetable for this change. My Dean of Faculty has added a good idea to this plan, which is to first describe what powerful activities we already do with technology before addressing how a laptop program will amplify and expand these.

UHS is considering adopting a 1:1 student laptop program within the next few years. No fewer than four of our peer high schools in the area are also seriously considering such initiatives. Up until now, only Urban School and Sonoma Academy had fully implemented high school student laptop programs.

This new momentum has everything to do with Web 2.0. Whether or not you buy into the hype, it is true that the prevalence of low-cost, widely used scripting (PERL, PHP, ASP) and database (mySQL) applications have given rise to a new generation of data-driven web services such as Moodle, Google Maps, and podcasting. At the same time, students have learned to navigate new Internet technologies through e-commerce, social networking sites, and music file swapping.

More than ever, the wireless-equipped laptop has become the indispensable tool to access these resources at any time. Anyone who wants to fully engage in these new means of communication needs a fully-featured device that is accessible at any time and can move with him/her from place to place. As schools select which of the new Internet technologies will become mainstays for education, the pressure will increase for schools with the necessary resources to provide greater ubiquity of computer access to students.

We continue to make progress toward the possible implementation of a 1:1 student laptop program at UHS. Yesterday, I presented a comprehensive overview of the program to the full board of trustees for the first time. My main thrust was to provide as much context as possible so that everyone could understand how we got to this point. I explained that the genesis of the student laptop idea rested in the strategic planning process that the school undertook two years ago. The plan's technology recommendations included a mandate to review annually the methods used to provide computers to students at UHS.

The purchase of a new building on Sacramento Street accelerated our consideration of change, so that our academic technology committee spent the fall semester of last year reviewing different ways to provide student computer access in our new campus configuration. Last spring, we presented the Faculty with two choices: an expanded desktop computer program that would place more computers in science labs and art classrooms to accommodate the increase in classrooms, and a student laptop program that would virtually eliminate computer labs and provide individual computers to students.

Trustees asked quality, critical questions about the presentation. How will the laptop program bring greater equity to student computer access? Are there less expensive ways to accomplish this? Are alternative devices besides laptop computers available for such a program? How enthusiastically do teachers support this initiative? What are some of the curricular ideas that they envision being able to implement with a laptop program? How will laptops help students do their work for school? Are teachers concerned about possible disruption to classes? Should the school introduce the program in August 2006, January 2007, or August 2007? What other schools have or are considering student laptop programs? What have we learned from our faculty laptop program? How would laptops change teacher practice in the classroom? How would our professional development program support teacher training for student laptop use?

One challenge during this process has been to maintain the focus of the trustees on the students. In my mind, this is primarily a student laptop initiative, and the students will be the primary beneficiaries of the laptop computers. I would predict a rapid increase in student communication and great increases in organization and efficiency of managing documents and other files.

Here are the next steps in the process of considering this proposal. The board chair has created a subcommittee of the finance committee to put together a detailed proposal considering multiple program options that would affect overall cost. The finance committee will review and consider this proposal and then forward it to the full board on November 28 for approval or denial. It is going to be an eventful month!

Session: The Web Portal As a Bridge to a Student Laptop Program

I would like to present a workshop describing our transition toward a 1:1 student laptop program, but it is a little difficult to encapsulate it into a neat package. One reason is that we tend to operate organically and through consensus, rather than attempting to move the school to a new place through large, targeted initiatives. Over the last three years, our computer use has increased up to the point that a student laptop program now makes sense. Some of this is due to the acquisition of a new building and the realization that our future, far-flung campus will be less well suited to desktop computers than is our present configuration. However, I believe that our web portal has also played an instrumental role in preparing the school for a student laptop program.

Unlike many schools, we have made the leap to the cusp of student laptops with few classroom laptops. Our science laboratories are the only classrooms that have dedicated laptop computers. Other classrooms do not have access to them. Yet, the pressure exists for students to have access to computers more of the time. Why? I believe that our web portal is the reason. Unlike classroom activities, which tend to take place during discrete periods of time, web access happens at all hours. Students check email, write in forums, read course web pages, post photos, create review sheets, submit service hours, compose independent study proposals, download permission forms, listen to audio broadcasts, play games, post announcements, look up sports schedules, and do work online. These activities happen anytime, anywhere. This pattern of use is particularly well suited to ubiquitous computing, so that students do not have to seek a school computer during the day or compete with family members for shared computers in the evening.

Our faculty lists the following three factors as the most important for our adoption of a student laptop program:

* Leveling the "playing field" for student home computer access.
* Making possible powerful classroom activities that are consistent with current pedagogical practices
* Increasing the efficiency of student work for students


I don't know whether there is a legitimate workshop presentation in all of this, but it is a major movement within the school.

Our Board of Trustees will consider the student laptop proposal in October.