Increasing Numbers of US Student Laptops
As you can see in the numbers above, we had a bumper crop of home-owned laptops brought to OES this week for Upper School finals. The only technical issues we had were minor problems with printing, which were almost entirely resolved by the proctors having students email or jumpdrive files to a school computer for printing.
To put these numbers in perspective, during the Fall 2004 finals, we had 177 computers in use, of which 87 were laptops brought from home. Of the home laptops, 76% were PCs and 24% were Macs.
During the Fall 2005 finals, we had 203 computers in use, of which 97 were laptops brought from home for Upper School finals. Of the home laptops, 54% were PCs and 46% were Macs.
During the Fall 2006 finals this week, we had 247 computers in use, of which 128 were laptops brought from home. Of the home laptops, 61% were PCs and 39% were Macs.
If I’m reviewing the data correctly, we had an increase in home-owned laptops from 2004 to 2005 of 11.5%. The increase of home-owned laptops from 2005 to 2006 was 32%. Also, for the first time ever, there were more home-owned laptops in use than school-owned computers.
Next year, a majority of incoming ninth graders will be from our 1:1 laptop program in the Middle School, and they will have the choice of bringing a laptop from home, borrowing a laptop from us, or just using desktops around the Upper School. We won’t always have increases of 32%, but we expect increases to continue.
EdTech | Jim Heynderickx December 14, 2006
The post above lead to some interesting discussions on the ISED-L discussion list. Here’s one of my responses for more information:
We record information about home laptops as they are brought in, and we aid in the process of gaining Internet access and printing capability.
We don’t add them to our domain, however, because we don’t want admin rights on their systems. Also, we don’t want them to have browse rights to our network. AD authentication would make some things work more easily (like PaperCut), but we’ve always found a way to work around the need for AD authentication by the systems themselves.
We have a 1:1 program in the Middle School with school-provided laptops, but in the Upper School we have a more flexible system. During finals weeks, we basically are 1:1, but other times it’s a “bring or check out a laptop when you need it” environment. This allows us to stretch our loaner pool of laptops while still enabling science students, for example, to check out laptops for one or more weeks for their projects.
We have two pilot courses that “require” laptops (Computer Science and a History course), and about half of the students in those courses bring their own and the other half borrow laptops from us. As the percentages of home-owned laptops increase, we could support additional courses in similar ways.
We have a statement about the differences between the Middle and Upper School program at http://www.k12converge.com/?p=139
A lot of schools may prefer a required 1:1 program in the Upper School as a way to ensure common access. In our case, we’re taking a slower approach that fulfills needs as they arise. This gives us more time to appreciate the diversity of technology use.
The post above lead to some interesting discussions on the ISED-L discussion list. Here’s one of my responses for more information:
Even in our Middle School program, we’re incorporating as much open source software as possible (for image processing, audio work, programming, 3D modeling) so that students can install the same software on their own computers without incurring significant costs.
Alice Software (http://www.alice.org/) is a good example of intro level programming software we can use in both the Middle and Upper School programs. Gimp and Audacity are additional examples. Students can buy Adobe Elements or other commercial titles if they want, but we keep the baseline as inexpensive as possible.
One title that we expect all students to have on their home-owned laptops is Microsoft Office. We’re planning to register our school and all US students at http://www.techhead.org/ so that Office Standard can by bought by students for $68 to $75.
If we ever had courses that expected all students to have Mathematica, for example, the challenge would be greater, but we would do our best to investigate the best prices and options for families. Currently, I believe the student price for Mathematica is $130, which isn’t much more than some textbooks.
Our goal is to keep the standardized software costs as low as possible.
At the same time we realize that there are lots of ways to “spend money”
that benefits students with their own laptops: subscription databases, computer labs with limited sets of high-end software, and advanced peripherals.