Student PCs: Worth the cost?

Ninth-grade science students usually learn Newton's second law of motion by copying and memorizing it.

But in Katy Pupungatoa's class at Oak-Land Junior High in Lake Elmo, freshmen learn that force equals mass times acceleration in an experiment with toy cars, a sensor that measures speed, and their laptop computers, which instantly display results.

"When they actually see it, it makes a huge difference," Pupungatoa said.

All of the students in class, and in fact all 1,000 students at the school, have laptop computers supplied by the Stillwater School District that they take to every class and can take home every night.

This is the end of the sixth year of that program. Now, with uncertainty over how the state budget deficit will hit its finances, the district must decide whether to expand the program, curtail it or continue it largely intact.

No matter what district leaders decide this year, the march of technology into classrooms and its use in teaching will continue in Stillwater and everywhere, said Aaron Doering, assistant professor of learning technologies at the University of Minnesota.

He may be right. The Edina School District is in the early stages of formulating a plan that could put laptops in the hands of all its students from eighth grade on up. The Bloomington district is piloting a plan that gives some middle school students access to a laptop in every class, but keeps the laptops at school.

"I don't know how we can go back," said Stillwater Superintendent Keith Ryskoski. "We should continue to go ahead and make more technology available to our students."

What's more, "the research is saying that the only way to integrate technology in the curriculum is to have the one-to-one in the classrooms," said Michael Burke, technology director for the Edina district. "When the kids walk in, if instead of opening their textbook, they open up their laptop, then they are ready to go."

Money a factor

But school boards, which set policy, are sometimes less enamored of spending more money on computers.

"Everything is going to be driven by the budget," said George Hoeppner, chairman of the Stillwater board. Hoeppner said he likes the idea and the results of laptops in the classroom, but it is just one program of many successful ones in the district, and he wants to know the costs and impact of continuing or expanding the laptop program before making further commitments.

"I'm not willing to give up other areas" in order to enhance or expand the laptop program, he said. Costs for continuing and expanding the program range from $300,000 to $1.2 million annually.

"It's not an inexpensive option," Sue Burke, technology coordinator for the Bloomington schools, said of her district's potential plans to add more laptops. "We want to make sure this is going to help them learn."

The biggest threat to laptops in the classroom may not be strained public school budgets, but other digital teaching and learning technologies that are successfully competing for funds. School districts have spent millions of dollars on Smart Boards, software that helps instructors assess and teach students to play their instruments better, and some classes are in the early stages of using iPods to download lectures.

"The laptop is not the end-all," Superintendent Ryskoski said. "It's a device that allows us to access content and to deliver content."

High-stakes tests

Other impediments to laptops in the classroom have less to do with money and more with how schools achieve their objectives, such as teaching and taking state-required tests, which gobble instruction time and curriculum attention.

Some school officials say the learning that comes from students making video compositions of, say, the Great Depression or performing science experiments with laptops may increase understanding but may not help kids on exams.

"If you have a classroom that is dictated by standards ... you are not giving teachers the flexibility to bring in these innovative methods because you need to make sure the students can take and pass those tests," Doering said.

Teacher training is important too, all agree.

"We've had intense training," said Derek Berg, principal of Oak-Land. And in Edina, about 20 teachers already have signed up to help implement the potential one-to-one laptop program.

"You could have a trained teacher in a classroom with one computer who would be more effective than untrained teacher with 30 laptops," Doering said.

Gregory A. Patterson • 612-673-7287