Teaching with Netbooks

But for the past several years, though the need for one-to-one computing was clear, the cost was extremely prohibitive. Even with educational discounts, Macbooks run $900 apiece and cheaper laptops are more than $600 each (not to mention the costs of additional software, like Photoshop and Kidspiration).

Relocate the navigation toolbar, buttons, and search box to the menu bar. To get this done, right-click on Firefox 3.5's toolbar and choose Customize. From there, drag and drop elements on the lower toolbars to the menu bar, and check off "Use small icons."

There are a few tricks to optimize your netbook to meet the needs of students. Regarding the track pad on the netbooks, we disabled the tap feature that allows students to tap their track pad rather than clicking the button. We found that tapping the track pad was very confusing to elementary school students so we disabled it. We also slowed down the speed of the pointer and the double-click speed. We made changes to the Internet Explorer so that it had minimal menus as screen real estate is such a premium on a netbook you do not need to waste it on things like a Google bar or tabs. As a bonus, the new Internet Explorer does have a full screen option (F11) which allows students to see a lot more of a website by going to full screen mode. It also includes a zoom feature, so if students need to they can zoom out to see the entire web page. Mind you, on a netbook screen, the text will now appear very tiny. Another way to increase screen capacity on the small netbooks is to set the task-bar at the bottom to auto hide.