Laptops in Schools?

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Some school systems are starting to equip certain grades with laptops. This article describes a survey Maine’s 2 year old 7th & 8th grade program.
There are many challenges to successful technology implementations, including:

  • Opportunity cost (dollars & time) What are we not doing when we’re spending money on laptops & overhead for them?
  • Training & Support
  • Things change fast, are we better off to support our student’s critical thinking, rather than the latest windows, mac or linux pc? (I think we are). These tools will change quite a bit by the time the students enter the workforce.

School Board Debate

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Lee Sensenbrenner writes:
In a sign that this spring’s Madison School Board elections are being taken more seriously than in years past, the debate season has already begun and an independent Web site is tracking the candidates’ positions.
Whether the district will pursue another referendum to address its budget problems is certainly a leading issue, but candidates are also pushing curriculum changes to the front, as well asserting that board members have not been sufficiently independent from the district’s administration.
I’ll be posting video clips and mp3 files here shortly.

Watching the Jobs Go By

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NY Times OP-ED Columnist Nick Kristof on the weakness in US science and math education.
Mr. Subbakrishna, a management consultant specializing in technology, notes that in his native Bangalore, children learn algebra in elementary school. All in all, he says, the average upper-middle-class child in Bangalore finishes elementary school with a better grounding in math and science than the average kid in the U.S.

The Eastern Sierra, CA

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Stunning, beautiful, visit! (we did last year)
Bridgeport is one of those California places Californians don’t think about much. If you drew a line due east from Petaluma, across the valleys and the mountains, you’d hit Bridgeport, about 115 miles south of Reno and 90 miles north of Bishop.
It’s as pretty as a postcard, nestled in a wide valley with the Sawtooth range of the Sierra Nevada to the west. The highest peak is the 12,264-foot Matterhorn, named for the Swiss mountain.
Highway 395 is the town’s main street, and it runs past old white houses, and a modest business district surrounding the 123-year-old Mono County Courthouse, plunked like a Victorian wedding cake in the middle of town. There is even a cannon on the lawn. Carl Nolte, SF Chronicle.

X Prize

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The government is very close to deciding whether to grant the first licenses for commercial space flights carrying passengers, the chief commercial space regulator said on Monday.
Three teams have applied for permission to send people on suborbital ships, which would fly to an altitude of about 100 kilometers, or 63 miles, and then return near the point of launching.
Burt Rutan’s Scaled Composites has posted an extensive library of photos and information from their test flight program (very interesting!). They recently flew faster than the speed of sound.