<p>Several years ago our public school district purchased several hundred laptops for the schools. About two thirds of them were stolen within six months. Personally, i would rather the money go to teachers salaries, which have not risen in five years.</p>
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I have raised three kids in NYC schools, ranging from age 23 to 13. None has EVER had a penmanship class. My son’s grade level isn’t even expected to be able to write in cursive. This has been a major issue for all of my parenting life and I have never heard of penmanship classes in that time.</p>
<p>Great points, inparent. Son’s school is still within that five-year period, so perhaps it will get better as time goes on.</p>
<p>My son also is required to bring his laptop to class. I would add that after four years of shoving into a backpack and throwing it around that it is ready to be thrown some place else after graduation. Now students purchase a laptop and are responsible for maintainance. We paid $650 every year for a tech fee, which could have paid for two laptops in the same time frame.</p>
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<p>Neither of my kids had penmanship lessons (HS senior, college junior) and it is obvious.</p>
<p>I’m in my mid-20s now and had plenty of handwriting classes until up around third grade or so (still one of the only people I know that actually write in cursive). That said, my handwriting is still atrocious.</p>
<p>I totally agree with the idea that hand writing notes helps put things into long-term memory better than typing. I can type around 120 WPM, so when I’m listening to someone speak I can almost get everything they’re saying without a problem. What happens then, though, is I’m basically just acting as a machine to write down every word. I don’t make an effort to interpret what words are the most important or rephrase what was said to make it into a more digestible chunk. When I handwrite things I’m forced to understand what’s being said before I start scribbling away.</p>
<p>In college, I only had a few classes where more than a few students brought their laptops. *I was an Econ major and several of my non-Econ professors went so far as to ban the usage of laptops. To be honest, most of the classes where a large percentage of students brought their laptops were the 2.5 hour, 1 day a week classes and the laptops were usually definitely a distraction, both for the user and for others in the class. For instance, in my Corporate Strategy class, I would always tinker with my fantasy football rosters. On a side note, I did very well in all of my leagues that year. And then there was the president of DG who sat at the front of the class and would always be either on facebook, looking at photos of other sorority girls, or shopping online. 4 years after the fact and I can still can remember the time she went shopping on the Neiman Marcus website, looking at swimsuits. Yeah, that’s not distracting to a 21 year old male. In my college career, it seemed like there were only a handful of instances where I would say to myself, ‘man, I wish that I could use/brought my laptop to class.’</p>
<p>Every student grades 7 through 12 in my town is given a laptop computer for home use which is ridiculous in this town where everybody has one or more computers already in the home. Most of the kids would get their own if the school did not provide it. This is a waste of tax dollars that we empty nesters are helping to fund. I don’tknow what this district is thinking when all they need to do is take a ride in their car and see the houses these kids are living in.</p>
<p>School expenses are paid with property taxes which are deductible for those that itemize. So there may be a calculation that the town gets the equipment in a tax-efficient way.</p>
<p>I have enough computing power in the house to run a medium size company :). I would be quite upset if the schools forced us to buy yet another one… </p>
<p>With the right network infrastructure at school (as in, a serious firewall that blocks pretty much everything) I would be OK with it, but not otherwise. **Most **kids simply do not have the brain power to ‘resist’ Facebooking during class, be it college or HS or MS. </p>
<p>We’re still a decade away from ‘affordable’ e-textbooks (not for technical reasons), and market share fragmentation will ensure that it stays that way for many years to come. </p>
<p>DD1’s college issued everyone in a specific program an iPad2 and while DD1 has done nearly everything on it on her freshman year, it’s been a distraction as much as it has been help. </p>
<p>Of course, one can argue that smartphones are just as much of a distraction, punt…</p>
<p>Cost is a big component, but another side thread to this is we’re not talking just laptops, we’re talking Mac laptops.</p>
<p>The spin from the school is that it would actually be less expensive to lease a larger amount of Macbooks from Apple then it would be to renew the lease on the current ones. Because the teachers have been trained on Mac’s for several years they say it would be difficult to switch to PC’s. Of course, the majority of students use PC’s at home. ;)</p>
<p>Not sure if it’s still true or not, but didn’t Apple used to heavily discount computers that were sold to non-college schools? I remember all of the computers I used going from elementary school until partway through middle school were Macs. I remember reading at one point their business plan was that kids would use a Mac at school, enjoy it, and then want a Mac when they go to college, work at a business, etc. I should also mention this was before most homes had computers and looking something up on the computer (in later years) meant using the encyclopedia in the CD drive. ;)</p>
<p>This may have been true for Apple IIs and Macs in the 1980s but typical educational discounts for Apple products run around 10% these days.</p>
<p>Encyclopedia? What’s that??</p>