On a May morning in Mary Kay Rendock's fifth-grade classroom here, the sounds of the dawning school day were echoing everywhere. Lockers banged outside in the hall, 10-year-olds chattered as they settled into their seats -- and a crescendo of chimes emanated from 15 laptop computers as every student in the room booted up.
At Carmen Arace Middle School, where laptops are something that students carry with them every day, Rendock's students knew the drill. Before the tardy bell, they were already scrolling through pages on their screens, lining up at the printer in the back of the classroom and handing over their assignments.
"Boys and girls," Rendock said as she leafed through the stapled papers, "these are impressive."
But in the midst of all the activity, one girl was barely stirring. She sat slumped in her chair, staring at the black screen of a computer that wouldn't boot up. Rendock walked over to try troubleshooting. Looking worried, she asked, "Do you think you lost anything when you shut it down?"
One-to-one computing
Such are the highs and lows of laptop schools, a growing cadre of educational institutions that have taken the controversial step of equipping every student with a portable computer to use at school and at home. For years, technologically inclined educators have been pushing this approach -- often called one-to-one computing -- as a radical way to provide Internet access and word-processing programs to students at any time, anywhere.
Issuing laptops may be expensive, but advocates (not to mention customer-hungry computer companies) say it is far better than shuffling students off to shared computer labs, where sessions sometimes last no longer than 40 minutes once a week. And it is the best way, they say, to bring the power of the Internet to all children, even those in the poorest families.
Yet many educators are still engaged in vigorous debates about whether laptop programs are really the panacea that some claim. In school districts with emaciated budgets, are laptops worth the pain of cutting other resources? What about the costs of technical support and teacher training? Won't the computers be magnets for muggers? And who is going to make sure that students use them for schoolwork as opposed to instant messaging and video games?
"Before they spend money on something like that, they ought to fix the leaky roofs," said Kenneth Reinshuttle, executive director of the Fairfax Education Association, a teacher's union in Virginia. The Fairfax schools were the focus of similar criticism five years ago when officials floated a proposal to require laptops for each student.
Academic results
But given the advances in wireless networks and the news that some laptops now cost little more than US$1,000 each, the push to outfit students with computers has taken on an inexorable logic of its own.
NetSchools, a company that provides hardware, software and wireless networking, is supplying computers to 68 public and private schools, up from 10 when it started in 1997. More than 800 schools and 125,000 students are taking part in Microsoft's Anytime Anywhere Learning program, which the company started with Toshiba in 1996.
Henrico County, a district near Richmond, Virginia, recently purchased a US$19 million networking package that included 23,000 Apple iBooks, which are being distributed this month to every high school student.
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