School laptops a waste of money

This New York Times article (registration required, link may disappear) says that schools that give laptops to students have been wasting their money. This was entirely predictable, because just putting technology "stuff" in the classroom was never going to change anything.

Unfortunately, I got an early lesson in that in Blacksburg in the mid-nineties when we had the first schools in the country with broadband in every classroom. I learned some hard facts from teachers, and figured out that if you want technology to have an impact on learning in the classroom, you have to do five things.

• You do have to buy some stuff, and every child has to have easy access to it, hence the focus on laptops for everyone. But this is only step one, and unfortunately, it is where most schools and school boards stop.
• You have to provide training--extensive and regular training--to teachers. Without it, few teachers will be able to make good use of the complicated technology.
• You have to provide adequate technical support. Unfortunately, there is never enough to go around, and teachers have enough to do without also having to install software, fix problems, and maintain dozens of systems.
• You have to provide classroom ready learning materials that fit the curriculum teachers are expected to teach. You can't just give teachers a laptop and tell them, "Use the vast resources of the Internet." The vast resources are the problem; teachers don't have time to develop entirely new sets of teaching materials from scratch.
• Finally, you have to physically redesign the classroom to use the technology. How can kids use a laptop all day long if there is no place to plug in chargers at their desk? Where does the LCD projector go? How easy is it to have kids use the projector to show off their assignments? And so on.

We can barely teach kids the three Rs these days. It is naive to think spending money on feel-good initiatives like laptops will have any effect without extensive structural changes in the entire learning process. But at least we are finally learning these lessons.