See “High-tech school program gets high grades,” an article about a laptop program that appeared in the Canadian newspaper The Globe and Mail. Essentially, it’s another story about a school district that initiated a laptop computer program that resulted in marked success in student test scores of one sort or another.
In my graduate class, we’re reading Hawisher and Selfe’s Literate Lives in the Information Age: Narratives of Literacy from the United States,
which I think is an excellent book. Among other things, it picks up the argument that Cindy Selfe has made elsewhere about the problems of just dumping computers in schools. She’s right– that doesn’t work. But at the same time, there does seem to be at least some evidence (like this article) that there is something to be said to the idea of getting some hardware into the hands of students and teachers who want to make use of them.
I also wonder if there isn’t something to the laptop element of things. Dumping a bunch of desktop computers in schools might not be a good idea, but what about computers (iBooks in this case) that can follow students around the school, that can be taken home, that can connect to the ‘net wirelessly? Hmmm….