mere implementation of 1-1 laptops alone will not accomplish great learning gains; they need to be integrated into effective, contemporary, forward-looking, best-practices learning environments, one where teachers are serious about engaged, active, collaborative, and creative student learning.
let’s not be too terribly deliberative and gradualist about this amazing opportunity to empower our students with these digital learning tools. We have seen the future (I have seen it, at a bunch of schools), and we need to embrace it, not resist it.
we believe a ‘bottom-up’ approach is better than a ‘top-down,’” said Katie Morrow,
Students will push and promote the laptop’s application in their various courses much more effectively than an administrator forcing it upon an unwilling teacher.
Rather than front-load reform with months or years of preparation, planning, documentation, training, organizing administrators, teachers, and systems, we need to go, put tools in kids’ hands, and ask them to use them, ask them to suggest more uses of them, empower and unleash them to LEARN with them. (While holding them accountable for excellent outcomes!)
Think buying or leasing hundreds of expensive machines that will become obsolete is a poor use of school funds, and playing platform favorites as an institution is now silly, as the world seems to speak PC and Mac with equal fluency and schools should, too.