Posted on 08/05/2014 9:49:12 AM PDT by Oldpuppymax
It took five years of pouring our money down a drain to finally prove to New Jersey liberals that it is not a smart idea to give laptops to seventh, eighth and ninth grade students to take home and use as they wish. It is amazing but true that people who work with children of middle school age don’t understand that kids will be… well kids, and they will generally not respect what is given to them by government.
Five years ago the school system in Hoboken New Jersey gave out government (read taxpayer paid for) laptops to children who saw them as “toys” and treated them as reverently as the books they were issued on the first day of school. The district’s computer network specialist said “half a dozen kids in a day, on a regular basis, bringing laptops down, going ‘my books fell on top of it, somebody sat on it, I dropped it. We bought laptops that had reinforced hard-shell cases so that we could try to offset some of the damage these kids were going to do. [But] I was pretty impressed with some of the damage they did anyway. Some of the laptops would come back to us completely destroyed.”
Over the five year experiment with our money, (a federal grant funded it) the specialist said he found computers were loaded with “viruses, cracked screens, and dead batteries.” Many others were reported as stolen, and in fact he “spent much of his time filing police reports and...
(Excerpt) Read more at coachisright.com ...
“Stolen” = “traded for drugs”
Forget it jake.....it’s New Jersey.
I taught in a technical college where all students were issued laptops (paid for in fees). I was given extensive training how to integrate the laptop technology in teaching. While the laptop was a great aid in teaching, many of my students would use their laptops during class to surf the net, read their e-mails, play games etc. I finally had to have students close their laptops during most of class so they paid at least some attention.
I guess it depends on the value in the secondary market for used ones before one can accurately access a level of achievement.
Maine has been giving out laptops to middle schoolers since 2002.
The Maine Learning Technology Initiative is an initiative that gives Apple MacBooks (formerly iBook G4’s And G3’s) to all of the 7th and 8th graders attending public schools in Maine. These laptops are fully equipped with high tech and well used applications for educational use. The students use the laptops for homework, classwork, projects etc. According to Andrew Trotter, Maine was the first state in the country to provide laptops to middle school students statewide. When it began in 2002, it was one of the first such initiatives anywhere in the world to equip all students with a laptop.
A gift form now Senator Angus King. We now also provide laptops to most high school kids, but that is on a distrct by distrct basis.
The kids around here seem to take pretty good care of the IPads they got
School system bought thousands of tablets for seventh graders at the cost of millions of (tax) dollars.
There was a "High rate of loss and failure" for the tablets. Go figure, but the program was temporarily halted and what functional tablets were left, were collected.
They're restarting the program next year, at the cost of millions more dollars. Why? Well, after much evaluation, it was determined that the first project was an abject failure because the *wrong* tablets had been purchased. This time, school admins are certain, will be a complete success.
Anyone here know the definition of insanity?
Maine ain’t ‘Nawff Joisey’.
My grandson’s school has iPads for their use. However, they are used in school only, and locked in a drawer when not in use. Each student brings a USB drive for saving their work to show family.
Now that’s a legit use for tablets in a school.
My college student sons are appalled by the extent to which fellow students spend class time on their Ipads, and even moreso at most of the profs’ failure to insist they be turned off. Good for you for having them turned off.
If this wasn’t such an expensive lesson, I’d say I love seeing Liberal Utopian hopes and dreams dashed like this. Go back to the original proposal. I’m sure some Education PhD wrote that this would empower inner-city kids to be creative and explore the world through the internet. They envisioned a thousand flowers blooming in these young minds. A couple years later, what they got was reality. Most of these kids don’t give a s___t about education or using the computer for learning. They played games and sold them. All the Libs had to do was look in the computer labs in the schools. Were they filled with students during off hours? I bet there were dust and cobwebs on the keyboards.
***There was a “High rate of loss and failure” for the tablets.***
Remember the advertizement thirty years ago for those large mobile cell phones?
A kid is trying to put a square peg in a round hole. He grabs the cell phone and uses it like a sledge hammer to beat the peg into the hole.
This story reminded me of my early years as a landlord when my wife and I owned a half a dozen rental houses we leased to tenants. Over several years, when some tenants would move out, they would leave behind a mess and a few even deliberately trashed the fixtures, appliances, etc. I asked one of them one time when they wanted to know why I wasn’t going to return their security/damage deposit when they moved out, why didn’t they take better care of the place. Their reply was simple and stunning. “Because it’s not mine, it’s rented.”
Apparently pride of ownership does not extend to rental items. Some people are just pigs and have no respect for other people’s property. That’s the way we’re teaching our young folks nowadays.
Don’t get me wrong. I don’t support the program, jsut pointing out that it is not unique to Jersey.
It has cost us millions of dollars here in Maine and no one can point to any increased performance of our graduates.
The cost benefit analysis comes when you weigh the cost of the program against any savings in textbooks, if the computers don’t save an equal amount or more than the cost avoidance from buying books, then it’s not worth it.
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