On the other hand, about a month ago, I had dinner with Gary Brown, IT Director for the Woolongong Diocese of Australia (that’s about 125k kids – we get folks from all over to see Maine’s laptop initiative. He has a different approach. At a meeting students and faculty at one of his schools, he asked the teachers how many of them had or knew someone who had a MySpace account (a few hands) then asked the kids the same question (all the hands). His reaction? He turned to the faculty and said that they did not understand their students!

At his schools, about 95% of the students had cell phones. Did they ban their use? No. They purchased a system to push school announcements out to the phones. Some of the teachers use them for quizzes (kind of like the “clicker” student response systems). Now 100% of their students have cell phones. Their cell phone abuse rate? According to Gary, 0%.

Why? I suspect because instead of fearing a new technology he did not understand, he noticed that it was a tool used by his students, found out how it might be used for academic, or at least school, uses, and implemented them.

In Maine, we find that there is more breakage and off-task computer use when the teachers don’t use them for academic purposes. Ironically, when we use them regularly for academic purposes, the machines stay in good working order and kids actually do homework during homework time, instead of whipping through their homework as fast as they can so they can surf the web.

Curious: The quote from the first paragraph of the newspaper article says that the school system will be banning “personal electronic devices like iPods”. Does that include devices such as PDA’s, which are arguably quite useful for keeping track of assignment due dates and so forth, will be banned? Or how about convergence devices like the Treo, which combine the functionality of some devices that would be banned and others which would not? For that matter, what about laptops or tablet PC’s, which could be used for listening to music while on the bus? It sounds to me that the school board is simply making a lay figure out of the iPod and in actuality they have no idea what it is they are trying to do, or even what the problem is they are trying to solve.

I’ve said it before on my blog: There’s a disturbingly large number of school administrators and board members who would rather CONTROL students than EDUCATE them.