have to say!
I was at The School at Columbia University for three years (until late 2006)
and at the time, we owned all the laptops (iBooks). Kids would be assigned
a laptop for the year, and then every summer, we'd clean and re-image the
whole batch. Since it was K-8 and kids didn't really take them home, this
was a manageable solution for us - the newer laptops started out at the top
of the "food chain" - 8th grade, 7th grade, 6th grade, and then second and
third year laptops were given to lower grades, with 2:1 in 2nd and 1st
grades and 4:1 in Kindergarten - although many K teachers preferred
desktops.
This solution was pretty amenable to us (but we also had a big budget for
purchasing every year), but doing this at the high school level would be
tougher, especially if the students took the laptops home every night, and
they were dumped in lockers and carried around all day. Repairs were
minimum since most were covered under AppleCare (Tekserve was very nice to
us). We *did* have to have a large supply of Power Supplies (the older
Apple Power Supplies were constantly fraying and breaking). We also kept
spare batteries, airport cards and some other easily replacible parts
on-hand to facilitate turn-around, and kept a 10% loaner pool at all times,
ready to go.
Since laptops stayed in the classrooms mostly and were used under
supervision, repairs were reasonable and while it was a big project to
re-image and re-distribute every summer, with a network imaging solution,
razor scrapers, cleaner, rags and some goo-be-gone, it's not unmanagable.
Teachers had their kids back up their work to their network drives every
spring, so we could just wipe everything clean. For the 7th & 8th graders
who moved around a lot, we purchased inexpensive padded laptop sleeves with
shoulder straps. Those ended up being <$20/student. All of this was
included in tuition. Not sure how it is now.
Our most expensive repairs were for teachers - but this seems fair in
retrospect since these laptops travelled much more than the kids' did -
subway, apartment, subway, work, bus, weekend....
I rarely wished the families owned them (well, maybe a little with some
special behaviour cases where repairs were expensive) - it gave us a lot
more leeway when it came to behavioural issues with the laptops. It also
helped us in keeping things standardized, cleaned, and kept the line drawn
that laptops were a privelege, not a right. We had the general rule that
homework would not require laptops or internet access, and if a child did
take the laptop home, they had to be accompanied by a parent and a signed
release form in both directions - most folks took public transit and it
seemed unsafe to send a child on a subway with a $1500 laptop and no adult.
Jen
On Tue, Jul 15, 2008 at 9:28 AM, William Stites <
wstites@montclairkimberley.org> wrote:
> All,
>
> I am curious as to how many schools have 1:1 where the the school owns
> (lease or buy) the device vs. the school requiring the family to own the
> device.
>
> What I would like to know is what are the pro's and con's of both types of
> programs. If you are a school where the families own the device do you
> wish that you owned them and if you are a school where the school owns them
> do you wish the families owned them.
>
> Many thanks!
>
> William Stites
> Director of Technology
> The Montclair Kimberley Academy
> 201 Valley Road
> Montclair, NJ 07042
> wstites@montclairkimberley.org
> 973-509-4595
>
> [ For info on ISED-L see http://www.gds.org/ISED-L ]
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>
--
Jennifer Davenport
Director of Technology
Saddle River Day School
http://www.saddleriverday.org
[ For info on ISED-L see http://www.gds.org/ISED-L ]
Submissions to ISED-L are released under a creative commons, attribution, non-commercial, share-alike license.
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