[StBernard] NEWS: Laptops key in students' learning

[Westley Annis]

NEWS: Laptops key in students' learning

Periodically, the press office will publish editorials, articles and columns that feature Governor Kathleen Babineaux Blanco's work in various areas. During her administration, Gov. Blanco implemented Louisiana's Laptop Initiative, Turn On To Learning (TOTL), placing computers in sixth grade classrooms across the state. To learn more, click here <http://www.gov.state.la.us/index.cfm?md=newsroom&tmp=detail&articleID=3330> . 

Advocate: Laptops key in students' learning
Published: December 9 - Page: 1B
Click here <http://www.2theadvocate.com/news/12285816.html>  to view article online

By James Minton

BAINS - Sixth-grade students at West Feliciana Middle School will soon have something extra to take home in their book sacks: laptop computers.

Since they joined their counterparts in 53 other school districts across Louisiana in a pilot program, the laptops are gradually becoming an integral part of the students' educational experience.

Louisiana's laptop initiative, "Turn on to Learning, Critical Learning Tools for the 21st Century," was funded by a $5 million legislative appropriation and has put an Apple MacBook computer into the hands of more than 3,500 sixth-graders and 150 teachers across the state.

Each classroom also gets supporting equipment and software valued at almost $3,000, including a storage-battery charging cabinet, wireless access station, printer, data projector, an external hard drive, digital camera and a digital microscope.

Teachers also received iPod Touch devices for creating podcasts in the classroom and training on the computers and educational software.

The project is managed by representatives from the Governor's Office, Board of Elementary and Secondary Education, Department of Education and Board of Regents.

"This begins in earnest the statewide development of one-to-one learning environments, with one computer for every one student to demonstrate that computers are as important as books, paper and pencil in an earlier age," Gov. Kathleen Blanco said in a news release announcing the program.

"This whole process is going to change the way we go about educating children," West Feliciana Parish school technology Director Jerome Matherne said.

"Under the one-to-one concept, the teacher will no longer be the 'sage on the stage,' dispensing information. The teacher will be more of a facilitator because students now will have access to the information themselves," Matherne said.

"You may have heard the saying, 'We're drowning in information, but starving for knowledge.' That's going to be the (teacher's) challenge," he said.

During a recent school day, one teacher had students accessing the day's spelling lesson from the district's server, while a science teacher had her class connect to a college's Web site for a course on the atom.

The state of Maine gave all of its seventh- and eighth-grade students laptops beginning in 2002, but an analysis of scores on the statewide eighth-grade achievement tests did not show an appreciable change.

The study by University of Southern Maine educators said writing skills showed improvement, however, and the researchers suggested that "existing standardized tests are ill-equipped to measure 21st century learning taking place in one-to-one ubiquitous laptop environments."

The Louisiana pilot project chose an "ideal model" of two classes of 25 students per district in its requests for grant applications, but some districts made more ambitious proposals to include more students.

West Feliciana Superintendent Lloyd Lindsey, in briefing the School Board earlier this year, said he embraced the initiative but would not recommend dividing the parish's sixth-graders into groups of "haves and have-nots"

He said the school system should appropriate its own funds to round out the grant.

"I don't know how we could pick 55 students and say, 'You're getting them, and the rest aren't.' So we were going to have to do it for everybody," Lindsey said.

When 16 districts decided not to participate, West Feliciana and some other districts picked up the surplus units.

Northwestern Middle School in the Zachary Community School District did not participate because the program did not fit well with the school's large sixth-grade enrollment and the school's teacher-teaming concept, Principal Debbie Brian said.

"We did not want technology just for the sake of technology," Brian said. "We have to evaluate everything we do and say, 'What positive educational impact will this have?' Having to select certain students and provide them with a different type of instruction to be in compliance was not feasible for our population."

West Feliciana's eight sixth-grade teachers meet for an hour each Tuesday to "tweak" their plan for moving from students using the laptops in carefully controlled classroom settings to taking them home each day.

The seventh-grade teachers already are making plans to extend the program next year, Lindsey said.

The plan calls for parents' meetings in early January to explain the shared responsibilities for taking care of the computers and how they should be used off campus.

Allowing children to control $1,000 worth of electronics gear would make some educators nervous, but Matherne and the West Feliciana teachers are taking the challenge in stride.

The school district plans to escrow what it would normally have to pay for replacement insurance for a self-insurance program that Matherne is betting would come out ahead.

"Here we have the environment to make it successful," Matherne said.

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