For me my laptop is my source of connection to family friends and school. Being in Australia going to school both here and still taking some classes back home my lap top is the best thing I have purchased this year. I talk to my family, friends, and classmates using Skype. I do all my homework and do alot of my television and movie watching on here as well. Desktops are cheaper but unless you are going to permanently put a computer on each childs desk they really are impractible.

For us, laptops have provided flexibility of access and an ability for learning to take place anywhere. For us, laptops have been a solution to several problems. Originally it was sharing laptops between classes because we couldn’t afford additional computers for each class. Now it’s buying wireless capable laptops because our classrooms have very little power and cabled network capacity left. Isn’t it great to have to be forced into buying laptops - It’s still great to see the students in my class just pick them up, take them to their desk and start working.

In my view one of the challenges of getting the school to move to laptops is to show them specifically how the portability can be a huge advantage in bridging the gap between the wired classroom and modern learning methods. Alot of things come to mind in this regard:

-the ability to rapidly reconfigure the physical classroom to meet the demands of a particular project based lesson

-the ability to for the students to take the laptop home in order to complete lessons, engage in self-directed exploration, and to feel a sense of ownership of their computer-based learning experience (the laptop becomes their favorite learning tool). studies show an enormous percentage of teens are already accessing, creating, and sharing knowledge on the web at home, as well as developing social networks, and I think we must begin asking why aren’t these new competencies more integrated into the institutional educational experience. By having laptops that kids can take home, assuming the laptops are combined with web 2.0 based lesson plans such as blogging assignments, then we start meeting the students where they are already at.

-the ability for children who are sick or unable to come to class to work remotely–something that is easy depending on which software learning platform the teacher is using. In fact, one school I know of was discussing last year how in the event of a pandemic laptops combined with an online learning platform could give them a viable plan for maintaining continuity of their educational mission–a unlikely scenario perhaps but something that the administration was dealing with, I felt, quite perspicaciously.

My background is in Communication Studies and college level instruction, but lately I’ve been helping out a company in Chicago called, Ecto (www.ectolearning.com ). Basically they have created the online learning platform that I was describing earlier. I feel it really has the potential to laptop based instruction to life and it seems like the teachers who are using it agree. If you have a moment, I think that this short video that they made might be something that could help you develop your pitch for laptop classrooms–it doesn’t speak directly to each of those points but it does feature a number of teachers sharing their experiences (and unbridled enthusiasm) with regard to their use of laptops and EctoLearning in order to merge social networking with their classes.

http://www.ectolearning.com/ecto2/Page.aspx?p=yqknbdluyk

I look forward to seeing what you and the other think.

Cheers,
Stephen