That’s the amount of students that will have laptops in our school within a month. About 400 computers arrived today in huge bundles. The teacher-tech guy was sweating bullets dragging these bundles on one of those carts that slides under the pallets. They need to be inventoried, checked and then assigned to students and classes. I will have to modify my teaching but I am quite happy about the whole thing. I’m thinking of putting all my notes on a google page and then show them on the projector ( which will also be installed soon).
If anyone has advice, suggestions, warnings, whatever about teaching with computers, please send them this way.
Also, don’t worry, it won’t change things too much. You’ll still be a teacher. I’ve seen 1-1 programs, and they eventually calm down and the computers just become background items, like books and stuff.
who gets to remove all the viruses and spyware off the machines after 1 day’s of use ? Who is going to do the tech support for stupid kids that screw em up hope that have a nice big cloning machine
It’s funny how you computer lovers can only think of the negative stuff that can happen with this.
My school is in New Brunswick. We’ve had 120 students using laptops last year and not too many screw ups because there’s all kinds of protection. The students are also fairly young ( gr. 7 & 8 ) so there aren’t too many who know how to bypass the security stuff. We have an on site tech support and a tech teacher to help implementing the program. MSN is blocked, outside webmail is blocked ( even gmail!), outside wireless is blocked, and many many sites are blocked as well.
I can’t wait because teaching science will be awesome with all the sites out there. We have a license with unitedstreaming.com for all kinds of online videos. I’m learning about wikis and writely. We already have a homework and news blog so that parents and students can access it.
Now you were computer savvy in grade 8 weren’t you? I know a lot of my students were ( Dustin was in my class once). Well, I don’t think many of them could have bypass Mr. Borges’s no-soup-for-you security system. Now imagine a provincial department of education committed to use computers in the classroom but so damn paranoid that a gallery of pictures like many schools in BC have ( CHSS is a fine example) is absolutely prohibited here. They have an internet block system not in the school but in the ministry network. So a major level of security isn’t even in the building. You and a few people posting here would probably be able to hack it. But the likelyhood of a 12 year old doing is not enough to avoid the benefits of using the laptops in the classrooms. The kids cannot use it if they are unsupervised. Every activity ( and I mean every activity) is logged and culprits can be found very quickly. Like I said, it is possible that a glitch happens but should we stop for that? You still travel by car even though people die daily in them.
Now the technical problems might be an issue. But we will be working on it.
Man, if you had the bad year I had teaching last year at that school ( without computers), you would welcome anything that could help you survive. I mean, behaviour challenged kids become more docile if you plug a computer in front of them.
hope that have a nice big cloning machine