New Mexico Laptops sustaining pedagogy

Published by in 1:1 on April 9th, 2006

According to the March 28, 2006 article “Students laud state initiative to buy them laptop computers,” 7th graders in the state of New Mexico are finding laptops a good tool to perform traditional educational tasks, but educational activities are not being transformed. According to the article:

“Laptops are not being used for the originally intended purpose of the initiative, which is to provide students with a technology based learning tool for everyday use,” auditors said in a report to the LFC. “Laptops appear to be used mostly for special projects and few laptops were observed on student desks or in use for instructional purposes.

The title of the entire article apparently came from the following quotation:

“My homework gets done faster,” Arthur Vigil, an eighth-grader at Pecos Middle School, told legislators.

I would hardly consider that comment to equate to “lauding” a laptop project.

This article reflects what I have observed in visiting with different folks involved with our statewide technology immersion pilot project (TxTIP). Traditional school is being done more efficiently, but school itself is not really changing, transforming, or being reinvented.

I strongly believe that school districts should lead a 1:1 laptop initiative with a curriculum reform initiative, and then seek to use the laptops to support that agenda. Merely putting laptops into the hands of teachers and students in a traditional curriculum setting is unlikely to be transformative.

That is because technology itself cannot change pedagogy. Larry Cuban’s book “Oversold and Underused: Computers in the Classroom” makes that point strongly, although he did not look specifically at 1:1 environments in the book as I recall.

1:1 learning is the future of education, but the form that education will take is still up for grabs.

On this day..

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