“Inside Hoboken’s combined junior-senior high school is a storage closet. Behind the locked door, mothballed laptop computers are strewn among brown cardboard boxes. Others are stacked one atop another amid other computer detritus. Dozens more are stored on mobile computer carts, many of them on their last legs,” Jill Barshay reports for The Hechinger Report. “That’s all that remains from a failed experiment to assign every student a laptop in this northern New Jersey suburb of New York City. It began five years ago with an unexpected windfall of stimulus money from Washington, D.C., and good intentions to help the districts’ students, the majority of whom are under or near the poverty line, keep up with their wealthier peers. But Hoboken faced problem after problem and is abandoning the laptops entirely this summer.”
“‘We had the money to buy them, but maybe not the best implementation,” said Mark Toback, the current superintendent of Hoboken School District. “It became unsustainable,'” Barshay reports. “None of the school administrators who initiated Hoboken’s one-to-one laptop program still work there, but Toback agreed to share Hoboken’s experiences so that other schools can learn from it.”
“By the time Jerry Crocamo, a computer network engineer, arrived in Hoboken’s school system in 2011, every seventh, eighth and ninth grader had a laptop. Each year a new crop of seventh graders were outfitted. Crocamo’s small tech staff was quickly overwhelmed with repairs,” Barshay reports. “We had ‘half a dozen kids in a day, on a regular basis, bringing laptops down, going ‘my books fell on top of it, somebody sat on it, I dropped it,” said Crocamo. Screens cracked. Batteries died. Keys popped off. Viruses attacked.”
“Hoboken school officials were also worried they couldn’t control which websites students would visit. Crocamo installed software called Net Nanny to block pornography, gaming sites and Facebook. He disabled the built-in web cameras. He even installed software to block students from undoing these controls. But Crocamo says students found forums on the Internet that showed them how to access everything,” Barshay reports. “All this security software also bogged down the computers. Teachers complained it took 20 minutes for them to boot up, only to crash afterwards. Often, there was too little memory left on the small netbooks to run the educational software.”
“Superintendent Toback inherited the laptop program when he arrived in 2011. At first, he tried to keep it going,” Barshay reports. “But he faced skyrocketing costs, which hadn’t been budgeted for. The $500 laptops lasted only two years and then needed to be replaced. Toback said new laptops with more capacity for running educational software would cost $1,000 each. Licenses for the security software alone were running more than $100,000 and needed to be renewed every two years.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Nowhere in the article is a rather important fact, the type of laptop, mentioned. So, we did some research.
On October 27, 2010, Katie Colaneri reported for The Jersey Journal, “Seventh and eighth graders in Hoboken will teach their parents a thing or two tonight at a special information session about the school district’s new laptop program. Two weeks ago, 91 eighth graders, 124 seventh graders and some teachers were given Dell Latitude 2100 netbooks for use in and out of the classroom for web-based learning and assignment sharing through e-mail.”
That’s right, as expected, the idiots bought exactly the wrong computers. Dell netbooks. Retch! Crappy Windows PCs waste taxpayer’s money and everybody’s time. What a fiasco!
Note to school systems that are interested in success: You want Apple iPads. If you have good reasons for notebooks instead, you want Apple MacBook Air/Pro units. DO NOT SKIMP ON PREPARATION. BE READY FOR DEPLOYMENT. IF YOU CAN’T AFFORD PRE-DEPLOYMENT PREPARATION, DO NOT EMBARK ON MAJOR TECHNOLOGY PROGRAMS.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Dogadoga” for the heads up.]
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