Posted on 07/29/2014 5:14:55 PM PDT by afraidfortherepublic
Inside Hoboken’s combined junior-senior high school is a storage closet. Behind the locked door, some mothballed laptop computers are strewn among brown cardboard boxes. Others are stacked one atop another. Dozens more are stored on mobile computer carts, many of them on their last legs.
That’s all that remains from a failed experiment to assign every student a laptop at Hoboken Junior Senior High School. It began five years ago with an unexpected windfall of stimulus money from Washington, D.C., and good intentions to help the district’s students, the majority of whom are under or near the poverty line, keep up with their wealthier peers. But Hoboken faced problem after problem and is abandoning the laptops entirely this summer.
“We had the money to buy them, but maybe not the best implementation,” said Mark Toback, the current superintendent of Hoboken School District. “It became unsustainable.”
None of the school administrators who initiated Hoboken’s one-to-one laptop program still work there. Toback agreed to share Hoboken’s experiences so that other schools can learn from it.
(Excerpt) Read more at wnyc.org ...
Should have forced them to build them themselves, just for starters. (Facebook for ____hours for successful task) Then, in order to use them, pass the ABCs of programming, and/or component building, or interelated tasks.
Loot from the working stiff becomes free money from the politicians.
Actually, I have to ADMIRE those kids for trashing their laptops...they seem to be the ONLY PEOPLE to realize that computers are USELESS as learning tools and they want NOTHING to do with them.
Even the one lady to vote against them thinks it’s only a problem of implementation, and therefore not endemic. Sounds a lot like what the Communists (in the US) said about Communism...one you get it right, all will be wonderful.
They used sliderules. We still have one.
The working stiffs are among the most uninformed of Americans. Too busy to learn, I suppose.
Laptops only work for the literate. That shut out a BUNCH of students.
I wouldn’t say that computers have helped anybody because for all people, regardless of their abilities, a computer hinders the immersive aspect for all learners. It may be easier to deal with if one is highly visual or auditory, because for a visual or audio learner the most important need to learn is to see or hear the material.
Somebody who is a kinesthetic learner, regardless of his ability, would be at a disadvantage because can’t use his modal of learning to learn.
Problem 1: Accepting “free” money.
Problem 2: Not having any idea how to use the computers before they were purchased.
Problem 3: Not analyzing the capabilities of the machines required to meet the needs identified in the nonexistent plan/idea/concept on how to use the computers.
Problem 4: Purchasing a raft of computers that were inadequate to the ill-/un-defined requirements.
Problem 5: Failure to identify training requirements for the teachers and the students.
Problem 6: Giving a computer to each teacher who apparently were not skilled enough to know how to use them.
Problem 7: Not implementing a robust enough network to support the computers because the school system had no idea what the requirements were.
Problem 8: Giving a computer to each student when the average student in the school system had no respect for property.
We had “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,’ ” said Crocamo.
Screens cracked. Batteries died. Keys popped off. Viruses attacked. Crocamo found that teenagers with laptops are still… teenagers.
Yep. Seen this.
“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,” said Crocamo. “I was pretty impressed with some of the damage they did anyway. Some of the laptops would come back to us completely destroyed.”
Yep. Seeing this here in LAUSD.
Hoboken school officials were also worried they couldn’t control which websites students would visit. Crocamo installed software to block pornography, gaming sites and Facebook. He disabled the built-in web cameras. He even installed software to block students from undoing these controls. But Crocamo says students found forums on the Internet that showed them how to access everything.
“There is no more determined hacker, so to speak, than a 12-year-old who has a computer,” said Crocamo.
Yep. My students have shown ME things on the internet. Things I was like "Wait... how did you... OH, MAKE THAT GO AWAY!!"
All this security software also bogged down the computers. Teachers complained it took 20 minutes for them to boot up, only to crash afterwards.
Yep. Exactly my experience. Tech is a nightmare to work with. You have to have a full-time tech support guy in the room with you or it's just more trouble than it's worth. I tried at first, I really did, but eventually I was just like "Nope. We are returning to the land of whiteboards, books, papers, and pens."
Liberals will learn nothing from this.
I think you are quite correct. The computer/internet seems to impose a lot of mental limitations and narrowing in the learning process, offsetting what I used to interpret as the medium’s virtues. It’s becoming gradually more and more apparent to me, the more I’ve interracted with young people who’ve been molded by all this.
If a student will not learn, nothing will make him.
If a student will learn, nothing will stop him.
Every one of those students was given as much opportunity as young Bill Gates was.
and slide rules. (I have one, I barely know how to use it)
Too many pictures in textbooks too, and they weigh way
too much.
My two kids here in Alabama... The High School is giving every kid an iPad. The school makes them by a case/cover for it, for $50. So I’m out $100.
At least it’s nnot $500! Each.
I think any math student towards the end of each course (and having a thorough grounding in the basics)should begin
using a graphing calculator. High school students without that skill set will be at a disadvantage in college level courses.
Another alternative-for juniors or seniors only; a separate 15 week course on using a graphing calculator.
For some students puters are a huge and beneficial advancement.
My son graduated HS in 2001. He started his freshman year in
a computer lab. Learned two programming languages, self taught himself several other languages, opened the first website dedicated to the truncated Windows software driving PDAs and caused the inevitable call from a nitwit ast. principal complaining that my son had destroyed their entire system.
He had caused all text entries to appear white.
The doofus started in on me with the cost to repair their
trashed system and the consequences yada yada.
I thought it was a great end of the year prank. It was hard to be stern while biting back the giggles. Son fixed their system with a few key strokes in the lab.
I guess I should have hidden my DOS handbook rather than pointing out it’s location to the little snot.
Makes his living as a heavy equipment operator, go figure.
LOL. Some people have no sense of humor.
I’m having trouble suppressing the giggles at your story.
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