A Laptop for Every Student

High school ambi

Windham High School opened this fall to ninth and tenth graders.

It will double in size over the next two years as those students progress and new ones arrive.

The building is spacious.

Natural light filters through the hallways.

Bell

At the change of class, a few hundred students pass through the atrium, very few seem to be carrying books.

Ambi-history class

About 20 students sit in a US history class.

They’re debating the American Revolution.

On one side of the room are the Patriots; the other side, the Loyalists.

Ambi – student saying, going back to the whole we should try to make peace and stuff, I think the time for discussion is over.

Sophomore Lauren Bostic is putting together her talking points.

No books, papers or pens clutter her desk.

Everything she needs is on the hard drive of her shiny white laptop.

Bostic: Right now we’re using research - primary sources on the Internet. I’m doing the Stamp Act, and we’re reading it as we go on as we’re discussing this to back up our supports and our opinions.

Bostic says this school year is very different from last year.

Bostic: We were taught using books. We had to read. We had twice as much homework as we normally would. Sheryl: You actually have less homework? Bostic: I think so, personally. We actually get more done with the laptops.

Proponents of laptops in the classroom say students can dig deeper into their studies.

I remember long hours at the public library, sifting through heavy encyclopedias and reference books.

But today’s kids google from their bedrooms.

Science class ambi

Joseph Mancinelli is a science teacher at Windham High.

His students are using their laptops to calculate the freezing and melting points of water.

Mancinelli: That gives me more time to explain what is actually happening in the lab rather than trying to teach them how to graph, teach them how to gather the data. We’re able to learn the concepts a little more in depth.

Science class ambi

Shyan Sheth is measuring the temperature of a beaker full of ice.

Sheth says that by using his laptop he feels like a real scientist in the modern world.

Plus, he gets to have fun.

Sheryl: Do you think there are kids that are fooling around and wasting time on computers? Sheth: Yes, I know, there are, because to be quite honest, I’m kindof one of them. Because (laughs) sometimes, actually a lot of the time, I get distracted. But this has taught me that what I should be doing affects my grades.

Carpenter: It’s a terrific learning tool. There’s no question that it enhances their productivity.

That’s Alan Carpenter.

He’s a parent at Windham High.

But Carpenter has some concerns.

These laptops have microphones, cameras and full motion video.

Carpenter: These students will absolutely use them in an inappropriate manner not because they’re bad kids. They’re teenagers. And if that happens on a laptop that I purchase my child and I monitor, that’s one thing. But when the schools give my child an asset that can be used in that manner, it’s a different story. And I think socially it raises some questions I’m not sure we have fully answered.

Mark Warschauer is an education professor at the University of California in Irvine. He specializes in digital learning.

Warschauer acknowledges that a few schools have canceled their laptop programs because of discipline problems.

Warschauer: If a school is disorganized, if teachers and students are wasting a lot of time, laptops can be a great way for both teachers and students to waste even more time. And so, a school that doesn’t have a strong educational program, that tries to solve its problems by putting laptops in, will generally not be successful.

Warschauer argues laptops will make a good school better.

But they won’t make a bad school good.

The Windham school district spent two hundred thousand dollars on its laptops.

Windham High Principal Rich Manley says the town paid for it by not building computer labs.

Manley: Existing schools would have to retrofit their schools and that makes the task quite a bit more challenging.

Cathy Higgins is the technology director for the state department of education.

She says the average statewide ratio of students to computers is five to one.

She’d like that ratio to improve.

Higgins: We also know there are plenty of research studies that students are becoming increasingly disengaged with school. Their life is fairly rich with digital devices. So it’s important to also look at: what are the appropriate tools in our classrooms today?

Higgins expects that in the future, more schools will be able to fund programs similar to Windham’s.

The state is receiving more than three million dollars of education technology grants through the federal stimulus package.

Two cities — Nashua and Manchester — qualify for grants of up to 200 thousand dollars.

A few school districts are planning new buildings.

State officials are advising them to think twice about designing isolated computer labs — unless they plan to use them for something else in the next five years.

For NHPR News, this is Sheryl Rich-Kern.