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Alabama Schools to be First in US to Get XO Laptop
Posted by
Zonk
on Tue Dec 04, 2007 11:21 AM
from the educatin-on-the-cheap dept.
from the educatin-on-the-cheap dept.
CountryGeek passed us a link to a story in the Birmingham News, saying that schools in the Alabama city will be the first US students to make use of the XO laptop. The piece touches on a bit of the project's history, and seems to indicate the Birmingham school district is ready to make a serious commitment to these devices. "Langford has asked the City Council to approve $7 million for the laptops and a scholarship program that would give Birmingham students with a C average or above a scholarship to college or tech school of their choice. The City Council has not yet approved the funding. The rugged, waterproof computers will be distributed to students on April 15, Langford said, and children will be allowed to take them home. If a computer is lost, the school system can disable it, rendering it useless, Langford said. Students will turn in their computers at the end of their eighth-grade year."
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Alabama? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Alabama? (Score:4, Informative)
Seriously though, you wanna see some of the worst parts of the country, go to the Delta areas of MS and some counties in AL. Poverty, STDs, teen pregnancy, HS graduation/college acceptance rates, life expectancies are among the worst in the nation. Do you think it's right to just ignore these areas for any sort of advancement?
The former Gov. of Mississippi, William Winter, put it best when endorsing the need for higher education in MS- "We can either compete with the other 49 states for jobs or we can do nothing and compete with China and Mexico."
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I'd bet you can find similar rates in Newark, NJ which isn't far from me and is very urban.
Although people like to generalize about the southern states having substandard schooling, I'm sure there are communities in every state that could use some he
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
The real question is will XO laptops help turn that around?
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
errr... the other 49 states are competing for jobs with China and Mexico....
Re:Alabama? (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Alabama? (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Alabama? (Score:4, Interesting)
Parent
Re:Alabama? (Score:5, Informative)
Etc. etc. I have no doubt there are plenty of smart, healthy, wealthy, open-minded folks there; however the statistics tend to suggest that overall AL (like much of the deep south) has a pretty unhealthy, uneducated and poor population.
-Ted
Parent
Lynchings? (Score:4, Informative)
Hardly relevant or timely but thanks for promoting the racist stereotype.
Parent
That was awfully one-sided. (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Would you rather they take a cue from Californi (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
Alabama, a thrid world country? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Alabama, a thrid world country? (Score:4, Insightful)
Maybe I'm confused, but from my understanding they need a lot of orders to fill mass-production needs, so why not? It's not like the school system is going to turn around and sell them on ebay for profit or something.
Parent
Re:Alabama, a thrid world country? (Score:5, Insightful)
Developing countries have been the focus, but the project has never ruled out working with school authorities anywhere in the world. What they ruled out was mass retail sale in developed countries as an early focus.
OTOH, there is a break from the earlier articulations of the principles of the project here, and its not in the fact that its in a developed country, its in the "Students will turn in their computers at the end of their eighth-grade year" part.
Parent
C average (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:C average (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Hey Paw, I got a C! (Score:4, Insightful)
It's getting to the point where the college degree is a relatively unimpressive feat in today's world.
Don't sound so elitist. It's a good thing that a college degree is a common feat. For a lot of students, college is the first place that's going to make them think and work. If these C students can't do it, they'll drop out fast and become truck drivers. If, however, they are genuinely hard workers but just not bright, or bright but never motivated, they'll get out of college the tools they need to get a better job, live in a better place, have better health care, and raise kids able to get Bs and As and lead a better life.
Should every child go to college?
To reiterate: no. But, we need more than our B and A students going to college. Because the jobs left in our country require either no-skill or the education from a college degree, we need get our "average" student into college.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
But in a way....it is lowering the standards, just like we're doing in so many other areas. With a college degree, this cheapens it. It is pretty much already the case that todays college bachelors degree, is the equivalent to the HS degree of a few decades ago. In the past and bachelors pretty much ensured you'd get a good paying higher level job. Now, a BS or BA is the minimum requirement for almost any job besides ridin
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
If you give everyone with a C or better average a scholarship to college or technical school, as the proposal described in TFA would, then those who have the performance to be admitted to college can use it to go to college (which most C students will not unless they have impressive test scores, extracurriculars, and/or demanding courses in which they got the Cs), and those who don't have the performance or inclination for college can
No they're not... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
C average? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
Re:C average? (Score:5, Insightful)
Here's something else I don't understand. What is this country's aversion to vocational schools/training? We as a society seem to look down on such training, but I'll gladly pay someone many tens of dollars per hour to make my car go, make my AC work, fix plumbing, rewire my house, add an addition to the dwelling, etc. There is nothing wrong with this. You don't like school, but think cars are fun? Hello mechanic work. It just seems silly, these people are as important to our economy and every day life as the surgeons.
Parent
Re:C average? (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Unless, of course, you think that with the same grades and other performance measures, people who are poor should be kept out of college in favor of those who are rich.
My own experience, as a kid coming from a poor family but with excellent grades and test scores, getting financial aid was super simple. It's the kids who have good, but not great, grades/scores that have trouble. Top schools compete for top students and will bend over backwards to ensure the top students have the means to attend. There are enough good students out there that the top schools don't have to compete for them.
Of course, a good student at a non-top school can very often be one of the top studen
Waste of money (Score:2, Interesting)
Why on Earth do grade school students need to be issued a laptop? Early education should be about learning the basics. I remember not being able to use a calculator even in college Calculus classes as the professor thought it made people lazy and dependent on them. I do agree that schools should have computers, but every student?!?! Computer labs work just fine and cost a lot less than issuing every kid a computer.
gasmonso http://religiousfreaks.com/ [religiousfreaks.com]
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I can't decide whether or not I agree with you. On the one hand, I have no difficulty imagining how computers could hinder education rather than help. People have a tendency to think that our education problem with somehow magically be solved if you just throw computers at the problem, when in fact the most important thing children can get is personal attention from parents and teachers.
On the other hand, our society (and economy) are becoming increasingly dependent on computers. Children who grow up wi
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
If you're literate, you can teach yourself anything you can find a source for.
If this computer can teach kids to read and write while they're having fun with it, that, by itself, justifies putting it in their hands. Anything else it can teach them is a bonus.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Isn't this a tired old argument already? I thought we had established what a useful tool that a personal computer had become for education. As a student from a rural area with limited educational resources, I can say from first hand experience with distance learning and paperless courses that PC's are becoming almost essential to education at the higher level. A good part of grade school education is priming children for the whole educational
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Waste of money (Score:5, Informative)
The primary problem in Maine's one-powerbook-per-child program has has come from backwards teachers like your Calc prof who won't adapt their teaching to the new technology.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Not all schools that are doing laptops are doing it with tax dollars. There are two public elementary schools in my neighborhood in Fullerton, CA. One of them (not the one my kids go to, thank god) tried to require every student to buy a laptop. A lawsuit resulted, and AFAIK the plan has not been implemented, but there are other schools that are trying the same thing.
Personally, I didn't mind buying $200 Linux desktop boxes for my kids, but standard laptops are a ridiculously bad choice for young kids.
Re:Waste of money (Score:5, Insightful)
Anyway, while a bit of a daydream I can see a potential at least.
1) The laptop as a replacement for textbooks. Able to be updated and searched. Also, carrying around one XO laptop is better than managing a half dozen books, and if the computers get recycled after 8th grade then the long term costs could level out.
2) It allows a student to keep more organized. Notes and assignments could be kept on the device and mirrored at a school or even district level server (the XO supports handwriting input). No more "forgetting your homework" since everything is in the computer. ("What happens if the student leaves it home" argument is irrelevant since that applies to notebooks too). Update school announcements and calendar events.
3) Media distribution to students. Imagine those typically boring films you had to watch, only being able to pause and rewind at your leisure and even take it home to study. Audio and video recordings/pictures from field trips or lessons. Combine this with those digital whiteboards and stream the info right to the laptops (already done in some places). A student could potentially take an entire day's worth of lessons home and replay them. Unit supports USB and wireless so storage isn't much of an issue on or off school grounds.
4) Parental monitoring. With the ability to record a log of daily use, if not entire lessons, the parents will have a better understanding of what goes on in the classroom (for better or worse). This assumes the parent actually bothers to access the laptop and check, of course, but it makes possible what is currently impossible or at least wildly impractical.
5) Electronic grading. With the ability to distribute and collect most assignments digitally, the entire process becomes simpler. One copy of an assignment can be distributed to any number of students and they can be submitted as soon as they are complete (cutoff times/due dates are easily implemented). Records of grades are easily maintained and accessed. Plagiarism is easier to detect using DIFF-like utilities, and I'd even support some kind of DRM-esque scheme to help detect or even prevent (something that is difficult to do with paper). Tests can be administered by providing a collection of questions that are presented in a different order for each student, with randomized answers for multiple-guess type exams. Beats scan-trons and makes cheating nearly impossible.
Again, all pure daydreaming on my part. None of this gets in the way of teaching the basics either, which I agree is most important. $200 per student seems a better deal than central labs, too. I've seen initiatives that have 1 computer for every 5 students, which is also about right for a computer lab since only one class can use it at a time. If the backend stuff is more or less the same, you can get five to ten $200 laptops for the cost of a single, normal desktop workstation - pretty significant savings - and each student has access all day.
=Smidge=
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
If grade school textbooks are anything like college textbooks, an XO is worth about two or three textbooks. That's pretty amazing when you consider that every student takes about 8 classes per year. Using open textbooks could *save* money if the schools bough
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
- Math: $100
- History: $100
- Language: $100
- Social Studies: $100
- Additional computers (per student): $50 (assuming student:machine ratio of 16 and an $800 Dell machine)
Total: $400
XO Laptop
- Laptop: $100
- Online textbook subscription: $100
- Additional computers (per student): $0
Total: $200
Seems pretty simple to me.
C average or above? (Score:2)
Way to keep setting that bar higher and higher, America! You can win by being average!
(In all honesty, I think affording more kids accessibility to laptops and University is a great thing. Just why not make it universal, rather than "C average or above," which makes it a bit comical... Those with F averages aren't going to be qualify for University in the first place. In fact, at least here in Canada, I believe
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Well, clearly, you are performing at below expected level, so wouldn't get the scholarship.
The laptops are universal, and not a reward. The scholarships are for C average or better, and are arguably not a "reward" either, so much as a recognition that either college or technical school is as necessary as a highschool diploma was a few decades ago, and the area wants to improve its economic condition, it would be de
All together now! (Score:4, Funny)
more news on alabama (Score:3, Funny)
just a joke.
What does this PC actually provide them? (Score:4, Insightful)
1) Most of the people who are teaching subjects, have their primary education in "education."
2) Teacher's unions.
3) School policies that don't allow proper discipline for disruptive students.
4) A legal system that actually listens to parents who sue when schools properly punish their kids for misbehaving.
5) Government monopolies that make it financially impossible for most parents to afford to send their kids to private schools or homeschool them.
But it's ok, technology will save the day. It couldn't do a damn thing for other social problems like pirating copyrighted materials, but it'll be able to take on... entrenched bureaucracies, good ol'boy networks, unions, crufty legal codes and parents who have no ability to hold their kids responsible for their behavior and are willing to shout and sue at the drop of a dime. Go technology, you modern day messiah of secular America.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Are you so sure? At least kids who do want to learn will have access to the greatest library the world has ever known. I have more faith in access to information than what you believe, which is that everybody just needs more punishment. (Technology is a failure because it hasn't cured the "social problem" of copyright infringement? Let's go back to stone age, nothing curbs piracy like illiteracy and having t
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
It provides them with executives from Intel and Microsoft getting on the first plane to Alabama to offer them a Windows-based laptop for a special discount price.
Re:What does this PC actually provide them? (Score:5, Interesting)
4) A legal system that actually listens to parents who sue when schools properly punish their kids for misbehaving.
-Ted
Parent
Don't laugh at Alabama. (Score:5, Insightful)
I was stationed in Alabama for a year. While there, I had a world-class Shakespearean theater at my back door. I loved living in Alabama.
Re: (Score:3)
That sounds neat, but I would think the novelty would wear off after a month of non-stop Hamlet recitals. Didn't they have anywhere better to go? Or are world-class Shakespearean theater troupes so common you have them just living on the streets? If so, I hope you left them some sandwiches.