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Designing laptops for kids
The old political saw states, “As Maine goes, so goes the nation.” If true, the nation better be ready to hand all of its high school students laptops, because the state of Maine is doing just that.
Yet even with the success of its now seven-year-old program to put laptops in the hands of all middle school students, some local administrators are bucking the state’s deal with Apple Inc. in light of the lousy economy.
According to Michael Dunn, technology director for Maine School Administrative District 17, the state had planned right from the launch of the program in 2002 to expand it from middle schools to high schools. To do so, Maine established the Targeted Technology Fund, which assigned to the schools a certain dollar amount per pupil to be used for technology. One problem — Maine allows complete control to each district over how it spends its state funds for education.
“The goal of that money was to get us (laptops) for high school students,” Dunn said. “Very few schools actually used it for that.” That included MSAD 17, where Dunn has been spending the funds on other hardware and personnel.
That all changed last year, according to Jeff Mao, learning technology policy director for the Maine Dept. of Education, when Mao and other state officials managed to negotiate the bulk purchase price of G4 Macbooks to $240 per unit from its previous price of $289 each. With the technology fund now sending back $273 per pupil per year to the districts, Mao felt it was time for Maine’s high schools to join the laptop program.
“It really took us to last year for the stars to line up, and we worked with Apple to get the price below targeted price levels,” Mao said.
Dunn and a few other tech directors, however, saw the state’s proposal as cutting his tech funds to about $30 per student — the students would get laptops, but at the cost of having to cut in other areas, such as services or personnel.
So they looked into buying netbooks at a cheaper price than the Macbooks coming from the state. After looking at a handful of netbooks from vendors such as Dell Inc., Lenovo Group Ltd. and Hewlett-Packard Co., the group chose an Asus Eee-PC from Asustek Computer Inc. of Taiwan.
“I think we are going to be able to provide one-to-one to our students at about 60 to 70 percent of what the state is going to do for us,” Dunn said.
Dunn is spreading the cost of the netbooks out over a three-year lease.
Two areas that are admitted concerns for both Dunn and Mao are tech support and teacher familiarity. Over the past seven years, the Apple laptops have had their own share of failures.
“When that happened, we just turned to Apple,” Mao said. Dunn, on the other hand will be providing support internally for the new netbooks. “If something breaks, he’s got nowhere to turn but himself,” Mao said.
Dunn believes he and his staff of three can handle the support issues. Instructor familiarity with the platform is more of a worry, he said. That is also the big concern for Susan Gendron, the state’s commissioner of education — and she has the numbers to back her up. Gendron’s studies have shown that teaching teachers how to use the laptops as a learning tool improves the education outcome.
“We have done a controlled study of mathematics (education),” Gendron said. “Where we introduce just the technology without professional development, math scores were flat. Where we did it with the development, math scores climbed.”
Since Maine high school teachers are most familiar with Macbooks, learning how to teach using a netbook running Windows XP or even Linux could be a big problem.
Dunn knows that he has his hands full. “We are going to really struggle as a technology department to support these,” he said.
“Is it going to be beautiful? No. Is it going to be less expensive? Yes.”
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