Alabama Schools to be First in US to Get XO Laptop 334
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."
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."
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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
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Re:Newark (Score:2, Funny)
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The real question is will XO laptops help turn that around?
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errr... the other 49 states are competing for jobs with China and Mexico....
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Please be advised that most people here in Florida that rate the Florida tag are first and second gen people from up north who come here for the weather, or finish out a parole sentence in a warm climate. OR with the assumption it is easy to scam people in the south, or that becase we live below the mason dixon, we are not as smart as our northern brethern.
Alabama is a hole but has a few good unis as well.
I
Re:Alabama? (Score:4, Insightful)
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Cut the troll crap! Alabama is not a third world country though I must admit that Birmingham City is not Alabama's finest and brightest.
I live in Alabama. Nobody ever went to the moon without going to my home town first! We are the people who invented the "Green Revolution" that feeds the world. We are the ones who gave the world many amazing medical advances and we are the ones who have some of the finest and brightest the world has. Alabama is a fine state and isn't even the 49th out of 50 economical
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, heterosexual, and Christian...
> The state has one of the strongest and faster growing economies of the USA.
As indicated by what?
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
Lynchings? (Score:4, Informative)
Hardly relevant or timely but thanks for promoting the racist stereotype.
That was awfully one-sided. (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Would you rather they take a cue from Californi (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Alabama? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Alabama? (Score:4, Interesting)
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These ideas aren't too far-fetched if you live in my Alabama hometown, the "Rocket City [wikipedia.org]".
Alabama, a thrid world country? (Score:4, Interesting)
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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.
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Also, OLPC initiated the "Buy 1, 1 Gets Donated" program in time for the holiday season, so it would be possible for an American school district to shell out $200 a copy for them and thereby send an equivalent number to under-developed countries.
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I don't know exactly what the deal is, but I don't see why they wouldn't allow it in Alabama. Scaling production up would allow the laptops to be cheaper. And besides, Alabama is almost like a 3rd world country.
Seriously, though, if the purpose is to build a laptop for children who wouldn't otherwise be able to afford a computer, there are enough poor kids in Alabama (or elsewhere in the US) for whom this project makes sense. Having some kind of access to computing is great for education, and I don't se
C average (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:C average (Score:5, Insightful)
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Good point. Some kids just need a chance to leave the backgrounds they came from to really develop, and a scholarship like this would do just that. When the best any family member has done is graduate high school, a C+ average might be very good.
The being said, a scholarship like this wouldn't be a appropriate for, say, a private school district in the Hamptons
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Either that, or someone wants to find future recidivists early...
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Two things about determining average grades (Score:2)
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You know what? I'm actually in favor of that...with the stipulation that they pay it back in full if they drop out before completing their second year of college.
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It also could mean that the school is already offering plenty of advanced courses in the form of AP classes. At my school (way back when), you got an extra 0.5 added
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.
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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
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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)
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Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
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Scholarships offered independently of the school don't guarantee admission, and the scholarships are for any college or technical school. So, even granting, for the sake of argument, that broadening admission criteria is potentially harmful, that's irrelevant to what is going on here.
Unless, of course, you think that with the same grades and other perf
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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
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Yeah, I'd agree that they'll be the big beneficiaries.
Credit crunch (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.
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Our aversion to vocational training comes from a bunch of elitist snobs who are in denial about being elitist snobs. If you listen to them, they'll claim the idea that "not everyone should go to college" is elitist, exclusionary, and bigoted. Inherent in those claims are the belief that you *must* go to college in order to be a decent human being, and that anyone who opposes a 100% enrollment in college only does so in order to keep everyone else "down".
It's a foreign idea to these people to consider tha
Re:C average? (Score:4, Insightful)
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Not that there's anything wrong with poetry, I just don't see how me not being able to quote Robert Frost means that my college is shitty.
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Or, possibly, the classics are no longer seen as important. I did Latin up to age 14 (1996), and was expected in the exam at the end of each year to translate passages I hadn't seen before and perform reading comprehension exercises on others. Out of my year group of around 100, I believe three went on to do Latin at GCSE and none at A-Level. In the entire country, I think only 100 or so did GCSE Ancient Greek in my year. My school had two teachers who were qualified to teach ancient Greek, but they had
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I'm not so sure the same problem exists in other fields; people have simply turned away from classicism towards more economically productive studies. Is th
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Only if you want to continue to use the trade schools as a dumping ground...
There is good money in the trades, but our society despises them so we chase potential talent away from learning about them.
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]
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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
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You to realize that computers are good for things other than "learning computer skills", right?
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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.
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I am currently earning a living as a freelance writer. Until I was around 14, my English grades were consistently around the C mark, with very few above a B-. Then, at GCSE, I was allowed to use a computer for essays. Suddenly my average shot up to an A with a lot of A* grades. I write more with a keyboard in an average day than I do with a pen in a year. If I had been able to type essays from an earlier age I would have gained a lot more from English lessons than I did. Instead of learning how to use
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Primary school (Score:2)
computer labs are horrible. It takes 10 minutes to get there, 10 minutes back, you loose almost half of the period.
That's why universities have a 10 minute gap between classes that start on the hour -- it gives you time to get across campus (or down the hall if you're lucky) to your next class. Maybe you live in Alabama and all your classes are taught in one room by Prof. Cletus Fuckstick, but the rest of the world isn't quite so backwards.
This article is not about universities. It is about primary school, up to and including grade 8. Especially in elementary schools (K-5), a given group of 20 students might have only one instructor for most subjects, with just phys ed, art, and music taught by specialists twice a week.
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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
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Brain may be only so big, but mind is infinite.
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.
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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.
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First off, I don't agree with the expense, but the rationale is more than just the direct utility of a laptop for school work. It's also about familiarizing kids with computers over everyday contact with them that you can't get from limited exposure at school during allotted times. I worked in a high school as a computer lab monitor for a couple years and almost all of the kids in the computer classes were really only different in that they were from affluent families that had access to computers. These
Learnig the basics != doing everything by hand (Score:2)
In my job I use routinely computers for things like solving differential equations. I know the basics on how this works. I know how algorithms like Runge-Kutta, Adams-Moulton, Bulirsch-Stoer, etc, work. However, I have never done these calculations by hand. What would be the point in that?
What students need to learn is how to get results from the calculations, the
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=
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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
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- 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.
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Learning how to use software is a waste of time except as job training. Knowing some specific pieces of software isn't computer literacy any more than knowing the story of Romeo and Juliet is literacy.
Computers aren't calculators. They
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
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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
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I live in the US (more specifically California) and everybody I've ever met makes a distinction between college (which is more general, and includes, e.g., 2-year institutions that issue only associate's degrees and various certificates, but not bachelor's or graduate degrees) and university (which is usually limited to institutions that issue graduate and/or professional degrees as well as undergraduate degrees, but sometimes used i
All together now! (Score:4, Funny)
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more news on alabama (Score:3, Funny)
just a joke.
C average - Low Bar (Score:2)
That's an awful low bar to ask them to meet. If I only need to make a C to get a scholarship, that's likely only as hard as I'm going to work for it.
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You probably need better than that to get into a decent school, which getting the city scholarship won't guarantee.
All this does (or is intended to do) is make it so that students that make even modest effort won't be denied access to whatever college or technical school their academic record qualifies them for because of their finances. Which, IMO, is a good t
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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
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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
alabamais3rdworld tag (Score:2)
So where will be the next place in the US to get XO's? Mississippi, West Virginia, or El Paso Integrated School District?
Probably not EPISD, they're too busy not giving the kids school lunches ("Nutritional mid-day snack"?) while taking the Federal school lunch program money. Among many other types of incompetence.
April 15? (Score:2)
Lost or Stolen (Score:2)
Yes to XO laptops; No to dome stadium (Score:2, Interesting)
I live in Birmingham, AL and think that it is a great idea to be equipping our children for life in the real world. Mayor Larry Langford's efforts, to this end, should be lauded.
On the other hand, and there is always another hand, this particular instance is a shell game. Birmingham (and sadly Alabama in general) has been the victim of poor leadership and frequent deception. In this case newly elected Mayor Larry Langford, formerly mayor of a nearby, poorer, decaying locality, rented an apartment in Birm
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.
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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.
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Maybe the thought is that the C students still have a chance to get motivated, and need to be reached in a different way, since whatever they're currently doing doesn't work?
Turner, not Down (Score:2, Informative)