Article #1

New York Times: Seeing No Progress, Some Schools Drop Laptops www.nytimes.com/2007/05/04/education/04laptop.html?_r=1

This article posted by the New York Times talks about some high schools that are running into problems issuing laptops to their students. It starts by talking about Liverpool High School in Liverpool, New York and the struggles they have had with students using the laptops for things like exchanging test answers, downloading pornography, hacking into local businesses, and playing games. When the school attempted to tighten their network security, students found a way around it and posted step by step instructions on line about how to do it. Other issue they were facing was financial problems. Not only was the mere buying of the computers costly, but the maintenance of the laptops was spendy as was the training for the teachers. Parents complained that their money was being wasted on something their child was learning to type and play games on, and teachers complained that their lessons were being distracted by computer glitches.

This article was not very complimentary to the idea of renting laptops to high school students, saying that they were not getting the learning benefits from it that the district was hoping for, but here is something to consider: in the example of the problem with tightening network security, a student learned how to get around it and then posted instructions on the internet. Albeit that the action was not conducive to learning, you have a high school student that is out smarting college graduates in network security and creating web pages. Is that not learning how to use technology? The greatest problem is that the teachers cannot keep up with the students. If we could learn how to channel that energy to hacking security systems into something else, then we would see more positive benefits. The truth is, the reason the students are playing games, hacking systems and downloading pornography is because they don’t know what else to do with them.