Laptop Lessons

One teen was caught trying to hack his way into a teacher's electronic grade book. Other students managed to circumvent the Bess filtering service to view porn sites, while another group of kids sucked up all the bandwidth on the schools' T1 line by swapping music and video files.

An educator's worst Net nightmare? Maybe, but in reality the above scenario represents nothing more than the growing pains of the Henrico County (VA) school district's "One student, one computer" program. Launched in September 2001 with its high schoolers, the district just completed the second part of the program in February: distribution of iBook laptops to its 11,000 middle schoolers.

The school district became the first in the nation to embark on such a program, by contracting with Apple Computer to lease 23,000 iBook laptops over four years at a cost of $18.6 million. Henrico County administrators had determined they could lease a wireless laptop for every middle and high school student and teacher without spending significantly more than it would cost to replace the district's desktop computers.

What they hadn't planned on was students' widespread level of misuse of the technology after launching the program. "The kids are much smarter than we are. If we think we can block them, they'll find a way around us," says Nancy Petravich, a library media specialist at Henrico High School.

Petravich, along with Henrico County's other teachers and librarians, discovered that it takes at least six to 12 months for many students to use their new laptops to begin to engage in real learning. "The novelty needs to wear off first, after they've played all the games," she says.

When the district contracted with a local Internet service provider for home Net access, students began taking their iBooks home on evenings and weekends. They soon preferred doing their research at home, rather than coming into the high school library. Wendy Sellars, the district's educational specialist for library information services, says that many students initially felt "that they didn't need the library anymore because they could carry around the Internet."

So Petravich and the other high school librarians brought the library to the students. They frequently carried their own laptops into high school classrooms, where they gave PowerPoint presentations on Web site evaluation, the value of print resources vs. online resources, and how to use the library's subscription databases, such as the Gale Student Resource Center and ProQuest.

Sellars says that since students received their own laptops, usage of the online catalog and databases was up 30 percent in 2002 and 2003. She's also seen a greater acceptance of laptops as learning tools. Sellars recently queried two freshman girls who had been using their iBooks for only a few months. One of the students told her: "Now whenever I read something I don't understand, I can look it up right away [in the online dictionary or encyclopedias]." "When I have a science project, I really like [to use] those databases," said the other student. "I can find what I need right away and move on."

Ironically, the librarians observed that while students had access to laptops, many of them seemed more receptive to recreational reading. Several district high schools, for example, have started their own book discussion groups—something unheard of before the laptops appeared—and there's talk among media specialists of starting an online book discussion group as well.

As for grades and test scores, Sellars says, "We haven't seen monumental change, but we didn't expect to. Our goal is more interactive, project-based learning and less 'teacher talk.' We estimate it will take from three to five years for these laptops to make a difference."

Now that the middle schoolers will also be using laptops every day, she says, the students will have had seven years' experience with them by the time they graduate. The glitz will wear off in the sixth grade, and after that the students will see the iBooks not as toys, but as everyday learning tools. The lessons they learn will be increasingly interactive, too. A group of high schoolers is currently reading Ernest Gaines's A Lesson Before Dying , and later this spring they will take part in a chat session with the author himself.

In the meantime, Petravich has learned another lesson—to get parents and teachers on board with the technology. She says that when her school held parent workshops, many had no idea the databases existed, and were amazed that such sophisticated tools were available to their children. Professional development for teachers is also critical. "The teachers are on all different levels," says Petravich. "We [librarians] have to take them from where they are and build their skills until they're comfortable with the technology." And librarians who find themselves giving students more instruction in using reference tools may need some professional development of their own. "All of a sudden," says Petravich, "you'll be spending a lot more time taking a much closer look at databases you thought you knew about."