Wednesday, May 5, 2010
Tuesday, April 27, 2010
Laptop Open House for parents
Couldn't attend the Laptop Open House on Wed., April 21st? Watch some of the action here.
Friday, April 23, 2010
READ: One-on-One at Port Jefferson
In his sixth-grade English class, Port Jefferson Middle School teacher Chuck Ruoff now faces an army of students, each equipped with a new tool in their backpacks:: a Lenovo Thinkpad laptop, issued to them by the district. Ruoff starts class one morning by displaying a grammar question on the Smart Board, an electronic chalkboard.
The students choose their answers by clicking a choice on their laptop screens. A minute later, Ruoff pulls up a pie chart showing their answers.
“So, we’ve got two answers that dominate,” he points to board, which shows that majority of the class – 68 percent – chose answer D, which happens to be correct.
“So, good job,” Ruoff said.
Port Jefferson jumped on the technology bandwagon last September, and smack into a national debate about the value of laptops in classrooms. Each sixth-grade student was issued a laptop at the beginning of the school year, which they carry between home and school to work on assignments.
Almost one academic year after the program began, school officials have deemed it successful, and aim to expand it throughout the middle and high schools in the next five years.
“It’s off to a very good start,” school district superintendent Max Riley said. The superintendent hopes to expand the program. The school planned to expand the program to include both the sixth and seventh grade next year.
School officials had hoped to issue a laptop to each student in grades six through 12 by the 2012-2013 school year, but Port Jefferson’s school budget defeat on May 18 complicates matters. The budget will be voted on again in a few weeks. If it passes, the program will expand.
If it doesn’t, the school will adopt a contingency budget that will rely on serious cost reductions throughout the school. It is not yet clear how a defeat will impact the future of the laptop program.
“The quick answer is, I don’t know yet,” Robert Frey, a district spokesman said May 19. The vote had a historically large turnout of about 1,500 voters, with two-thirds voting against it. Frey and the school administrators will work to put together a committee to revise the budget before a second vote, which will occur within a few weeks. “Clearly, when a budget gets voted down, you have to respect that vote,” Frey said, adding that he was unsure if voters said no because of economic concerns, or a dislike of specific programs, like the laptops or elementary school’s departmentalization.
School officials aren’t judging the effectiveness of the laptop program by any measured criteria, but rather, the fact that technology is infiltrating lives around the globe, and education should follow suit.
“This is how people live. They live with their computers,” school principal Roseann Cirnigliaro said. “And this is the world that our students live in, so we just wanted to make this a much more natural environment for them.”
But not everybody is happy.
Opponents are doubtful of the program’s academic value. Parents complain that their children use the laptops to play games, that the sixth-graders are too young for individual laptops, and the laptops are too heavy for students to carry back and forth.
Cost is another concern. Patrizia Rescia, who has a son in the eighth grade, called the laptops “expensive toys,” and said, “I don’t understand why they have to put laptops in the hands of 11-year-olds. I’d rather have a teacher, or two teachers, or three teachers.”
Rescia believes that most students in the district already have computers in their homes, and that the school funds should have been allotted elsewhere.
The 2009-10 budget allotted $90,000 for the laptop program. The program costs account for laptops for students and teachers – each teacher was also issued a laptop – as well as replacement costs and upgrades. This year’s student laptops cost $25,600 for the 82 sixth-graders in the school – roughly $300 per laptop.
The laptop program amounts to less than half of one percent of the district’s $37.1 million budget. “The cost is not as great as you might think it is,” Cirnigliaro said.
The 2010-2011 budget proposed $145,000 for the laptop program – a cost increase of 61 percent. The proposed budget was $37.7 million. It is not yet known how a defeat will impact the laptop program – if it will continue, be put on hold, or abandoned altogether.
If the budget is voted again and passes, exact costs for next year’s laptops are still unclear – the school is currently beta testing laptops from three manufacturers, and the school is still waiting on bids.
One laptop being tested is the Lenovo X100, which is lighter and smaller than the current Thinkpad (one complaint from students was the weight of the laptop; about five pounds). The Lenovo X100 is also about one-third cheaper than the Thinkpad.
The program, which school administrators call a “laptop initiative,” was adapted when demands for laptop carts and computer labs in the school intensified in recent years. Administrators had wondered whether the cost of purchasing more laptop carts would make more sense than expanding to an individual program. (Students in the other grades still use the carts and computer labs.)
Port Jefferson’s program is based off of a similar one-on-one plan at Westhampton Beach School District. Westhampton Beach first began its one-on-one program in 2004, also with sixth-graders. There is no set criteria administrators used to decide on expanding the program.
“The response is really driven by the Board of Education, administration, students and parents,” Bill Fisher, the director of technology at Westhampton Beach, said, adding that the laptops have allowed students to interact more with teachers, and for teachers to provide better feedback to students. Since 2004, Westhampton Beach School District’s laptop program has expanded to include grades four through 12.
Mark Warschauer, a professor at the University of California in Irvine and author of the book “Laptops and Literacy: Learning in the Wireless Classroom,” said, “Good instruction, plus laptops, is more engaging than good instruction without laptops.”
One-on-one laptop programs are being adapted across the country, with successes and failures. The Denver School of Science & Technology, a charter school in Denver, Colo., opened in 2004, issuing laptops to each of its students. In 2007, the school commissioned a study of its program; the laptops were most often used for physics, English and math projects. Teachers said that laptops “encouraged students to think creatively,” and the laptops provided more opportunities for feedback.
In 2002, Maine became the first state to establish a state-wide one-on-one laptop program when it issued laptops to every seventh-, eighth-grader, and teacher in the state, paid for, in part, by the state’s $70 million surplus. The program has now extended to grades seven through 12.
A study of Maine’s program concluded an increase in writing scores on the state exams three years after the program began. Students reported that they self-corrected more often and did more high-caliber work.
“Laptop programs can be challenging to implement well,” Warschauer said. “It’s not just a matter of passing out laptops.”
Liverpool High School, near Syracuse, N.Y., adopted a one-on-one program for several years before abandoning it because of constant glitches in the computer network and little change in test scores. High school students downloaded pornography, and the network consistently shut down during study hall periods when students flooded the school’s Internet system.
Neither Westhampton Beach nor Port Jefferson implemented laptop programs as a way to improve test scores. Experts say that laptops have little effect on test scores, though the machines do aid in providing students with more individualized learning.
“I’ve researched these programs for several years,” Warschauer said, “and basically found that laptops will make a good school better, but they won’t make a bad school good.”
Warschauer was referring to laptops in a lower education setting, but the finding comes at a time when some college professors are banning laptops from classrooms. One Georgetown professor made headlines in March when he prohibited laptops from his lecture hall, calling them a distraction and a nuisance. (The ban was noteworthy, in part, because Georgetown University had only recently begun requiring incoming freshmen to own laptops.)
At Port Jefferson, the laptop network is tightly controlled to avoid students misusing the laptops. Deep Freeze, a computer system installed on all of the students’ laptops, prevents students from downloading games or other items off the Internet, by intermittently re-setting the computers to their original settings. The system will also prevent computer viruses.
Problems like the network crashing haven’t occurred, according to Christine Austen, a dean at the middle school who helped to implement the program.
“We’ve just integrated a lot more technology,” English teacher Ruoff said. Classroom websites allow teachers to post homework and other assignments online. Instead of notebooks and pens, students at Port Jefferson now type out their notes in Microsoft Word documents. Teachers send multiple-choice questions to the kids and pull up the results within seconds, and sixth-grade teachers don’t have to schedule time in the computer labs, or request a highly coveted laptop cart.
In class, teachers can see a “snapshot” of students’ screens from their own district-issued laptops, and if a student is not on-task, the teacher can send the student a message and freeze their screen.
“In the beginning, there was a lot of excitement around it, but once you got past that, I feel like there’s not a whole lot of distraction,” English teacher Chuck Ruoff said. “The kids are pretty comfortable with using them.” Ruoff added that the amount of distractions caused by laptops is no different than his previous classes, before the program began.
While school officials believe the program is a success, some community members aren’t so convinced.
Comments posted anonymously on the Port Times Record website, all posted in October 2009, about two months into the program, say:
“I am yet another frustrated parent of a sixth grader trying to figure out why the district issued laptops to all these students…”
“Instead of spending all this time on the ridiculous laptops, why don’t we just get a curriculum? Dump the laptops!” “All my child does is play on it…I would not support another budget that included an expansion to this program for the coming years.”
Patrizia Rescia said in a letter to editor of the Port Times Record in April 2010: “I personally do not believe that the use of the computer is going to improve my daughter's learning experience. A school is only as good as the teachers.”
School district superintendent Max Riley, who has worked in school administration for 35 years, defends the laptops.
“There’s always parents who are distrustful of anything that whiffs of experimentation in education,” superintendent Riley said. “This is a place that transmits culture and there’s a lot riding on doing that well. So, you can’t miss a generation.”
Kathleen Murphy, the PTA president, has two children in the seventh and ninth grade, and so won’t be directly affected by the program for at least a few years, supports the program and said, “I’m looking forward to my kids getting them.”
If the school budget does pass, the incoming sixth-graders will receive laptops at the start of next year. If things go according to the school’s plan, grades six through 12 should be equipped with laptops in the 2012-13 academic year.
The laptops will go to the entire high school at one time, Cirnigliaro said, because it would be counterproductive to issue them to only one grade in the high school per year. The sixth-graders all have the same teachers and class schedule, while high school classes are mixed and students have different schedules.
Some parents say the sixth-graders are too young to be responsible for a laptop. Rescia spoke of seeing students swing their backpacks around, and worried about the cost of broken hardware.
At an informational meeting on the laptops in April, Christine Austen mentioned one girl who’d accidentally broken two laptop screens. But the computers are under warranty, and so anything broken is replaced. Generally, Austen said, the students are respectful and responsible for their laptops.
“I’m sure that high school students perform on a different level, and may need the technology,” Rescia said. “I would start with nine through 12, but not before that. When they’re old enough, responsible enough. The young kids, no. They don’t need it.”
The students choose their answers by clicking a choice on their laptop screens. A minute later, Ruoff pulls up a pie chart showing their answers.
“So, we’ve got two answers that dominate,” he points to board, which shows that majority of the class – 68 percent – chose answer D, which happens to be correct.
“So, good job,” Ruoff said.
Port Jefferson jumped on the technology bandwagon last September, and smack into a national debate about the value of laptops in classrooms. Each sixth-grade student was issued a laptop at the beginning of the school year, which they carry between home and school to work on assignments.
Almost one academic year after the program began, school officials have deemed it successful, and aim to expand it throughout the middle and high schools in the next five years.
“It’s off to a very good start,” school district superintendent Max Riley said. The superintendent hopes to expand the program. The school planned to expand the program to include both the sixth and seventh grade next year.
School officials had hoped to issue a laptop to each student in grades six through 12 by the 2012-2013 school year, but Port Jefferson’s school budget defeat on May 18 complicates matters. The budget will be voted on again in a few weeks. If it passes, the program will expand.
If it doesn’t, the school will adopt a contingency budget that will rely on serious cost reductions throughout the school. It is not yet clear how a defeat will impact the future of the laptop program.
“The quick answer is, I don’t know yet,” Robert Frey, a district spokesman said May 19. The vote had a historically large turnout of about 1,500 voters, with two-thirds voting against it. Frey and the school administrators will work to put together a committee to revise the budget before a second vote, which will occur within a few weeks. “Clearly, when a budget gets voted down, you have to respect that vote,” Frey said, adding that he was unsure if voters said no because of economic concerns, or a dislike of specific programs, like the laptops or elementary school’s departmentalization.
School officials aren’t judging the effectiveness of the laptop program by any measured criteria, but rather, the fact that technology is infiltrating lives around the globe, and education should follow suit.
“This is how people live. They live with their computers,” school principal Roseann Cirnigliaro said. “And this is the world that our students live in, so we just wanted to make this a much more natural environment for them.”
But not everybody is happy.
Opponents are doubtful of the program’s academic value. Parents complain that their children use the laptops to play games, that the sixth-graders are too young for individual laptops, and the laptops are too heavy for students to carry back and forth.
Cost is another concern. Patrizia Rescia, who has a son in the eighth grade, called the laptops “expensive toys,” and said, “I don’t understand why they have to put laptops in the hands of 11-year-olds. I’d rather have a teacher, or two teachers, or three teachers.”
Rescia believes that most students in the district already have computers in their homes, and that the school funds should have been allotted elsewhere.
The 2009-10 budget allotted $90,000 for the laptop program. The program costs account for laptops for students and teachers – each teacher was also issued a laptop – as well as replacement costs and upgrades. This year’s student laptops cost $25,600 for the 82 sixth-graders in the school – roughly $300 per laptop.
The laptop program amounts to less than half of one percent of the district’s $37.1 million budget. “The cost is not as great as you might think it is,” Cirnigliaro said.
The 2010-2011 budget proposed $145,000 for the laptop program – a cost increase of 61 percent. The proposed budget was $37.7 million. It is not yet known how a defeat will impact the laptop program – if it will continue, be put on hold, or abandoned altogether.
If the budget is voted again and passes, exact costs for next year’s laptops are still unclear – the school is currently beta testing laptops from three manufacturers, and the school is still waiting on bids.
One laptop being tested is the Lenovo X100, which is lighter and smaller than the current Thinkpad (one complaint from students was the weight of the laptop; about five pounds). The Lenovo X100 is also about one-third cheaper than the Thinkpad.
The program, which school administrators call a “laptop initiative,” was adapted when demands for laptop carts and computer labs in the school intensified in recent years. Administrators had wondered whether the cost of purchasing more laptop carts would make more sense than expanding to an individual program. (Students in the other grades still use the carts and computer labs.)
Port Jefferson’s program is based off of a similar one-on-one plan at Westhampton Beach School District. Westhampton Beach first began its one-on-one program in 2004, also with sixth-graders. There is no set criteria administrators used to decide on expanding the program.
“The response is really driven by the Board of Education, administration, students and parents,” Bill Fisher, the director of technology at Westhampton Beach, said, adding that the laptops have allowed students to interact more with teachers, and for teachers to provide better feedback to students. Since 2004, Westhampton Beach School District’s laptop program has expanded to include grades four through 12.
Mark Warschauer, a professor at the University of California in Irvine and author of the book “Laptops and Literacy: Learning in the Wireless Classroom,” said, “Good instruction, plus laptops, is more engaging than good instruction without laptops.”
One-on-one laptop programs are being adapted across the country, with successes and failures. The Denver School of Science & Technology, a charter school in Denver, Colo., opened in 2004, issuing laptops to each of its students. In 2007, the school commissioned a study of its program; the laptops were most often used for physics, English and math projects. Teachers said that laptops “encouraged students to think creatively,” and the laptops provided more opportunities for feedback.
In 2002, Maine became the first state to establish a state-wide one-on-one laptop program when it issued laptops to every seventh-, eighth-grader, and teacher in the state, paid for, in part, by the state’s $70 million surplus. The program has now extended to grades seven through 12.
A study of Maine’s program concluded an increase in writing scores on the state exams three years after the program began. Students reported that they self-corrected more often and did more high-caliber work.
“Laptop programs can be challenging to implement well,” Warschauer said. “It’s not just a matter of passing out laptops.”
Liverpool High School, near Syracuse, N.Y., adopted a one-on-one program for several years before abandoning it because of constant glitches in the computer network and little change in test scores. High school students downloaded pornography, and the network consistently shut down during study hall periods when students flooded the school’s Internet system.
Neither Westhampton Beach nor Port Jefferson implemented laptop programs as a way to improve test scores. Experts say that laptops have little effect on test scores, though the machines do aid in providing students with more individualized learning.
“I’ve researched these programs for several years,” Warschauer said, “and basically found that laptops will make a good school better, but they won’t make a bad school good.”
Warschauer was referring to laptops in a lower education setting, but the finding comes at a time when some college professors are banning laptops from classrooms. One Georgetown professor made headlines in March when he prohibited laptops from his lecture hall, calling them a distraction and a nuisance. (The ban was noteworthy, in part, because Georgetown University had only recently begun requiring incoming freshmen to own laptops.)
At Port Jefferson, the laptop network is tightly controlled to avoid students misusing the laptops. Deep Freeze, a computer system installed on all of the students’ laptops, prevents students from downloading games or other items off the Internet, by intermittently re-setting the computers to their original settings. The system will also prevent computer viruses.
Problems like the network crashing haven’t occurred, according to Christine Austen, a dean at the middle school who helped to implement the program.
“We’ve just integrated a lot more technology,” English teacher Ruoff said. Classroom websites allow teachers to post homework and other assignments online. Instead of notebooks and pens, students at Port Jefferson now type out their notes in Microsoft Word documents. Teachers send multiple-choice questions to the kids and pull up the results within seconds, and sixth-grade teachers don’t have to schedule time in the computer labs, or request a highly coveted laptop cart.
In class, teachers can see a “snapshot” of students’ screens from their own district-issued laptops, and if a student is not on-task, the teacher can send the student a message and freeze their screen.
“In the beginning, there was a lot of excitement around it, but once you got past that, I feel like there’s not a whole lot of distraction,” English teacher Chuck Ruoff said. “The kids are pretty comfortable with using them.” Ruoff added that the amount of distractions caused by laptops is no different than his previous classes, before the program began.
While school officials believe the program is a success, some community members aren’t so convinced.
Comments posted anonymously on the Port Times Record website, all posted in October 2009, about two months into the program, say:
“I am yet another frustrated parent of a sixth grader trying to figure out why the district issued laptops to all these students…”
“Instead of spending all this time on the ridiculous laptops, why don’t we just get a curriculum? Dump the laptops!” “All my child does is play on it…I would not support another budget that included an expansion to this program for the coming years.”
Patrizia Rescia said in a letter to editor of the Port Times Record in April 2010: “I personally do not believe that the use of the computer is going to improve my daughter's learning experience. A school is only as good as the teachers.”
School district superintendent Max Riley, who has worked in school administration for 35 years, defends the laptops.
“There’s always parents who are distrustful of anything that whiffs of experimentation in education,” superintendent Riley said. “This is a place that transmits culture and there’s a lot riding on doing that well. So, you can’t miss a generation.”
Kathleen Murphy, the PTA president, has two children in the seventh and ninth grade, and so won’t be directly affected by the program for at least a few years, supports the program and said, “I’m looking forward to my kids getting them.”
If the school budget does pass, the incoming sixth-graders will receive laptops at the start of next year. If things go according to the school’s plan, grades six through 12 should be equipped with laptops in the 2012-13 academic year.
The laptops will go to the entire high school at one time, Cirnigliaro said, because it would be counterproductive to issue them to only one grade in the high school per year. The sixth-graders all have the same teachers and class schedule, while high school classes are mixed and students have different schedules.
Some parents say the sixth-graders are too young to be responsible for a laptop. Rescia spoke of seeing students swing their backpacks around, and worried about the cost of broken hardware.
At an informational meeting on the laptops in April, Christine Austen mentioned one girl who’d accidentally broken two laptop screens. But the computers are under warranty, and so anything broken is replaced. Generally, Austen said, the students are respectful and responsible for their laptops.
“I’m sure that high school students perform on a different level, and may need the technology,” Rescia said. “I would start with nine through 12, but not before that. When they’re old enough, responsible enough. The young kids, no. They don’t need it.”
The Beginning: laptops at Port Jefferson
Port Jefferson School District announced its one-on-one laptop initiative to parents back in April of 2009.
Each sixth-grader was issued a Lenovo Thinkpad laptop at the beginning of the 2009-2010 school year. They will carry the laptops to and from school, and will use them for homework, as well as schoolwork in Word Documents, Power Points, and the Internet.
Costs, which included:
laptops for students, and a laptop for each teacher in the middle and high schools
replacement costs
expected software upgrades
amounted to about $90,000.
The budget for the district was $37.1 million.
School officials believe the program is beneficial to students -- they say it provides better interaction, and is better equipping them with technology in an ever-evolving world.
Opponents, including parents, says that the laptops are a distraction, are unnecessary, and the sixth-graders are too young to have them.
The school plans to add laptops to next year's 6th-grade class, as well as continuing to provide them to the current students (next year's 7th-grade class).
The school plans to add a third grade level the year after (grades 6-8 in the middle school), and then expand to the entire high school in 2012; grades 6-12.
What do you think? Are the laptops a good idea? Are they worth the cost? Are kids learning more?
Each sixth-grader was issued a Lenovo Thinkpad laptop at the beginning of the 2009-2010 school year. They will carry the laptops to and from school, and will use them for homework, as well as schoolwork in Word Documents, Power Points, and the Internet.
Costs, which included:
laptops for students, and a laptop for each teacher in the middle and high schools
replacement costs
expected software upgrades
amounted to about $90,000.
The budget for the district was $37.1 million.
School officials believe the program is beneficial to students -- they say it provides better interaction, and is better equipping them with technology in an ever-evolving world.
Opponents, including parents, says that the laptops are a distraction, are unnecessary, and the sixth-graders are too young to have them.
The school plans to add laptops to next year's 6th-grade class, as well as continuing to provide them to the current students (next year's 7th-grade class).
The school plans to add a third grade level the year after (grades 6-8 in the middle school), and then expand to the entire high school in 2012; grades 6-12.
What do you think? Are the laptops a good idea? Are they worth the cost? Are kids learning more?
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)