Blog Archive

Thursday, March 18, 2010

Looking at Building a case for Laptops in schools for teachers and/or students? Examples and Research here


My executive director shared these with me today and I wanted to share because it seems to me that many of us are looking at various laptop initiatives and when asked to support their reasoning we can cite a few examples or word of mouth success. These examples and research assessments do a great job of really diving into the data and looking at what works, what didn’t, and then opens up the discussions as to why something did not work. Thank you Debbie, for sharing these:

In Boston Public Schools, we deployed 5,000 teacher MacBooks to all teachers K-12 last year.  The teachers have been placed into cohorts and provided with a variety of APD opportunities.    Boston College has assessed this project and information can be found by going to:  http://www.bc.edu/research/intasc/researchprojects/L4L/L4L.shtml.

In the School District of Philadelphia, all high schools are part of the Classroom for the Future project which has provided each core content teacher and their classroom with a mobile cart of MacBooks.  This project has been driven by the State of PA and has been assessed by Penn State University.  Here is the link to the assessment reporting on the CFF project:  http://cff.psu.edu/public/Home.html

In New York City, the iTeach/iLearn project provided teacher MacBooks and 1:1 student deployment in 21 schools with 12 using Apple.  A quality report from MS 202 can be found at:  http://schools.nyc.gov/OA/SchoolReports/2006-07/Quality_Review_2007_Q202.pdf.

In Maine, all middle school and high school teachers across the state have been issued MacBook computers.  All middle school students and approximately 50% of all high school students also have MacBooks 24/7.  Quantitative research on a variety of aspects of the Maine initiative can be found at:  http://www.usm.maine.edu/cepare/.  In addition, the Technology and Assessment Study Collaborative at Boston College has completed a number of studies looking at both teachers and students in the Northeast equipped with computers.  Their work can be found by going to:  http://www.bc.edu/research/intasc/.

2 comments:

Rick T said...

Check out what LPS has been doing in this area. http://www.littletonpublicschools.net/DISTRICTINFORMATION/GetInvolved/LPSBlogs/tabid/656/EntryId/386/Writing-with-Laptops-Yr2.aspx

Michael Wacker said...

Yes, very exciting, and I know that St. Vrain is also looking at a similar initiative in a school or two. I think that laptop initiatives when done well are tremendous, I didn't even mention in the post about SLA. They get it right, students are the first and sometime s second level of IT, they feel ownership of their machines, and they are seeing tremendous success. I think it would be tremendous if Lehmann wrote a reflective and critical analysis about the tremendous things he has seen in the past 4 years, that would really be something.