“Kansas City, Kan., school administrators have unveiled a program that would outfit every high school student in the district with a laptop computer by next school year.
Calling the proposal one of the most important decisions in the district’s recent history, administrators said at Tuesday night’s board meeting that the plan would be a dramatic move for a district in which about 50 percent of the students do not have access to computers at home,” Dawn Bormann reports for The Kansas City Star.
“The proposal, which has yet to earn board approval, would cost about $2 million a year. It would pay for a lease on 6,000 Macintosh computers, technology upgrades to wireless access, support and more,” Bormann reports.
Bormann reports, “If approved, every high school teacher and student would be assigned a machine each year. Students could tote the laptops in and out of schools just as they do textbooks.”
“If board members approve the proposal, laptops would be distributed to teachers before school dismissed for the summer,” Bormann reports. “The extra time could give teachers a chance to start thinking about refocusing some teaching strategies.”
Bormann reports, “Students would not be assigned a computer until at least November. Grade levels that would receive the laptops generally would be ninth through 12th. Many of the existing high school computers would be distributed to elementary and middle schools.”
Full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Kansas City school administrators obviously have their act together on this one. The only type of hardware that school systems should be considering today are Apple’s OS-unlimited Macs. If any school system is considering spending money on OS-limited PCs from HP, Dell, Gateway, or any other PC box assembler, taxpayers should complain loudly because their money would be slated to be wasted foolishly. Only Apple Macs can run the world’s most advanced operating system and, if need be, Linux variants and Microsoft’s porous Windows.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Shinobi” for the heads up.]
