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To be used successfully in the classroom, however, Wilson and others say that netbooks must be given the same kind of consideration as other technologies. Technical support, training for teachers and students, network capability, and curriculum are all still necessary investments whether using laptops, netbooks, or smaller, hand-held devices such as cellphones.

“With the onset of the netbook and the price-point difference [over laptops] and the movement in open-source courseware and cloud computing, ... they’ve made the distribution of netbooks a very exciting way to solve the problem at a cost less than laptops.”

The state is not discouraging districts from buying netbooks, Mao says, but he is advising school leaders to consider all of what they are getting, or not getting, for their money.

I guarantee that netbooks are completely sufficient for most internet applications, word-processing, and 99% of the spreadsheet tasks I do on a daily basis at my job! Yes, storage capacity is less in a netbook than in the average laptop, and laptops have optical drives where netbooks don't, and laptops have more powerful processors.