Every student is issued a laptop in grade 9 and must keep it in excellent working order for their entire school career.
We have experienced mayhem with the computers. Many broken. Luckily, we have had a super team of tech savvy kids. They have helped the school out tremendously and have fixed countless issues with both hardware and software. There will no doubt need to be a dedicated IT staff — whether that be the students or the teachers. I highly recommend it be the students, but sometimes the talent will not be there (they do graduate!).
The breakneck pace of innovation at the moment is unprecedented in human history. It fascinates me to no end. There is no way that a set of textbooks could possibly keep up with the knowledge creation that is happening. A laptop is the essential learning tool today — not a textbook.
This then means that there needs to be access to wifi. For me, it is necessary to provide unlimited access. The kids can literally walk across the street to a cafe and look at anything they want. That said, in my experience, the biggest problem is with bandwidth. This does have to be monitored. School is not the place to be pirating software or streaming Netflix.
Ultimately, it comes back to the value of constructing learning. It is truly amazing what can be done these days. It is time to move away from top down feeding, to bottom up inquiry and guidance.
Textbooks are poor creators of knowledge. On a laptop, students can make an infographic, blog post, video, podcast, photo shopped awesome thing to represent their learning of an area of interest that they have been researching. All represented in their portfolio that can be used to apply to anything.
I have not worked out the numbers, but I am pretty sure that all the textbooks a student needs throughout high school would quite easily equal one laptop.
One laptop per student and open access to wifi are key components to an inquiry based school as well as necessary ingredients to pursue innovation in our current, advanced, and getting more advanced, technological world.
