Ditching the Laptops: What are the implications for computer-assisted pedagogies?

Link: Seeing No Progress, Some Schools Drop Laptops - New York Times.

This is a secondary-school level problem, but supposedly it propagates out to the post-secondary schools as well. I've taught in laptop programs for many years, and encountered at one time or another every issue raised in the article below.

The question is: are these obstacles enough to justify ditching the programs? And perhaps a bigger issue (one for a great academic study in a secondary school setting): WHAT is causing the biggest roadblock? I mean, is there a McLuhan-esque cognitive ratio shift going on in the classrooms, or are the one-to-one laptops simply the wrong technological tool at the wrong time? Is it a flawed tool, or is the pedagogical model itself flawed?

The kids appear to be doing precisely what we knew kids would do. And technophobic teachers are also doing precisely what we knew they would do. But my mom taught third graders with Apple II's in the 1980s, and had them programming in Logos, making books, doing all kinds of really neat stuff. She was so pissed in the 1990s when they took the machines out of her classroom and made the students take "computer classes."

I think that's when the problems started. The the teachers who were coming up with neat projects (self-selected, integrated) to incorporate them into regular classrooms were taken out of the loop (or else roped into teaching those "how-to" classes), and then moved into separate (segregated, if you will) "computer classrooms" (not integrated with other class topics). THEN administrators tried to re-integrate computers into ALL classrooms (one-to-one laptops). You completely lose control of pedagogical innovation, and try to make the laptops into just another classroom tool, like a piece of chalk.

Obviously, some teachers will respond better to technology in the classroom than others, so there are also issues in HOW the programs are being evaluated. Are they studying the programs across the board, or looking at the cool things that are being done?

That said, I've done such an evaluation of a university laptop program, a pilot I participated in, with original student research. I have mixed feelings about the entire endeavor, related to some issues I raised in this CNN.com column. I'm not saying these are definitive takes on the project, but I'm highly suspicious of the evaluations reported below, of the methods by which the programs are judged, as well as the methods by which the programs were implemented. I suspect both were flawed, and ditching the programs risks throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

Meaning, I DON'T like the way the programs were set up in the first place. I'd say they were set up to fail. And while I would not teach with laptops exactly as I have in the past (I still don't want the machines on and part of the process 100% of the time, nor do I want to DENY ACCESS in the classroom either, for specific projects), I don't think schools are going about this the right way at all.

Link: Seeing No Progress, Some Schools Drop Laptops - New York Times.

Seeing No Progress, Some Schools Drop Laptops

Narayan Mahon for The New York Times

John Gabriel, 18, left, Jeff Hendel, 17, and Mary Grace Van Ness, 17, used a school-issued laptop for fun during lunch at Liverpool High.

By WINNIE HU

Published: May 4, 2007

LIVERPOOL, N.Y. — The students at Liverpool High have used their school-issued laptops to exchange answers on tests, download pornography and hack into local businesses. When the school tightened its network security, a 10th grader not only found a way around it but also posted step-by-step instructions on the Web for others to follow (which they did).

Scores of the leased laptops break down each month, and every other morning, when the entire school has study hall, the network inevitably freezes because of the sheer number of students roaming the Internet instead of getting help from teachers.

So the Liverpool Central School District, just outside Syracuse, has decided to phase out laptops starting this fall, joining a handful of other schools around the country that adopted one-to-one computing programs and are now abandoning them as educationally empty — and worse.

Many of these districts had sought to prepare their students for a technology-driven world and close the so-called digital divide between students who had computers at home and those who did not.

“After seven years, there was literally no evidence it had any impact on student achievement — none,” said Mark Lawson, the school board president here in Liverpool, one of the first districts in New York State to experiment with putting technology directly into students’ hands. “The teachers were telling us when there’s a one-to-one relationship between the student and the laptop, the box gets in the way. It’s a distraction to the educational process.”

Liverpool’s turnabout comes as more and more school districts nationwide continue to bring laptops into the classroom.

[...]

Yet school officials here and in several other places said laptops had been abused by students, did not fit into lesson plans, and showed little, if any, measurable effect on grades and test scores at a time of increased pressure to meet state standards. Districts have dropped laptop programs after resistance from teachers, logistical and technical problems, and escalating maintenance costs.

Such disappointments are the latest example of how technology is often embraced by philanthropists and political leaders as a quick fix, only to leave teachers flummoxed about how best to integrate the new gadgets into curriculums. Last month, the United States Department of Education released a study showing no difference in academic achievement between students who used educational software programs for math and reading and those who did not.

[I don't know about you, but I don't give a lot of credence to most of what has come out of the current administration's Department of Education, esp. under the current secretary. The programs (No Child Left Behind), the secretly paid shills masquerading as journalists, and other agendas (like Neal Bush's computer educational materials being foisted on Katrina victims) all tend to leave the department with about as much credibility as FEMA, or the Department of Justice, or even NASA or the Department of Interior, where scientists' work is doctored for a political agenda.

So I don't see the study above as something I'd set total stock in. My guess is that this administration is just looking for a handy excuse to deny funding for some project to low income and minority school districts. I mean, if the tech project money is taken away, I doubt it would be replaced with anything else, for those districts. Unless there were some rabid right-wing "faith-based" outfit looking to seize control of it and start doing Chuck Colson-style indoctrination or something.]

[...]

Two years ago, school officials in Broward County, Fla., the sixth-largest district in the country, shelved a $275 million proposal to issue laptops to each of their more than 260,000 students after re-evaluating the costs of a pilot project. The district, which paid $7.2 million to lease 6,000 laptops for the pilot at four schools, was spending more than $100,000 a year for repairs to screens and keyboards that are not covered by warranties. “It’s cost prohibitive, so we have actually moved away from it,” said Vijay Sonty, chief information officer for the district, whose enrollment is 37 percent black, 31 percent white and 25 percent Hispanic.

Here in Liverpool, parents have long criticized the cost of the laptop program: about $300,000 a year from the state, plus individual student leases of $25 a month, or $900 from 10th to 12th grades, for the take-home privilege.

“I feel like I was ripped off,” said Richard Ferrante, explaining that his son, Peter, used his laptop to become a master at the Super Mario Brothers video game. “And every time I write my check for school taxes, I get mad all over again.”

Students like Eddie McCarthy, 18, a Liverpool senior, said his laptop made him “a lot better at typing,” as he used it to take notes in class, but not a better student. “I think it’s better to wait and buy one for college,” he said.

[...]

Many school administrators and teachers say laptops in the classroom have motivated even reluctant students to learn, resulting in higher attendance and lower detention and dropout rates.

But it is less clear whether one-to-one computing has improved academic performance — as measured through standardized test scores and grades — because the programs are still new, and most schools have lacked the money and resources to evaluate them rigorously.

In one of the largest ongoing studies, the Texas Center for Educational Research, a nonprofit group, has so far found no overall difference on state test scores between 21 middle schools where students received laptops in 2004, and 21 schools where they did not, though some data suggest that high-achieving students with laptops may perform better in math than their counterparts without. When six of the schools in the study that do not have laptops were given the option of getting them this year, they opted against.

Mark Warschauer, an education professor at the University of California at Irvine and author of “Laptops and Literacy: Learning in the Wireless Classroom” (Teachers College Press, 2006), also found no evidence that laptops increased state test scores in a study of 10 schools in California and Maine from 2003 to 2005. Two of the schools, including Rea Elementary, have since eliminated the laptops.

[Yeah, if that's the sole measure of success, "increase test scores"? Good god, I could drill and skill any class to death and increase test scores in two weeks, if that's all they want from education. Such teaching is merely indoctrination, and it produces good little robots. I'll give this guy credit, tho. He understands the study is limited.]

But Mr. Warschauer, who supports laptop programs, said schools like Liverpool might be giving up too soon because it takes time to train teachers to use the new technology and integrate it into their classes. For instance, he pointed to students at a middle school in Yarmouth, Me., who used their laptops to create a Spanish book for poor children in Guatemala and debate Supreme Court cases found online.

“Where laptops and Internet use make a difference are in innovation, creativity, autonomy and independent research,” he said. “If the goal is to get kids up to basic standard levels, then maybe laptops are not the tool. But if the goal is to create the George Lucas and Steve Jobs of the future, then laptops are extremely useful.”

[...]