A tablet now costs somewhere in between one to two years' worth of textbooks, so it's debatable whether it's really that much of a burden. Whether or not everyone is using laptops, it irks me that schools don't seem to care about reducing backpack load for students that would prefer soft copies. Incidentally, some of my courses have used notes that were written in-house, in LaTeX, it appears, and I'm satisfied with those. They're cheaper, much more portable, usually more understandable, since they closely mirror the course content, and I could probably convince some of the profs involved to give me a soft copy, but I haven't tried yet. So basically, I'm annoyed that schools aren't actively trying to eliminate the current burden of overpriced textbooks that get obsoleted quickly, weigh much, and often aren't that useful anyway for more than example problems.

In response to your comment, perhaps there needs to be more research about how to use tablets to facilitate learning. It doesn't seem like there's any noise coming from that direction, and there's certainly room for new ideas, like shared virtual chalkboards and such.

AutoCAD, for example? Mathematica? SAS/Stat? Websphere? Photoshop? Windows? Help me out here, I'm trying to come up with some other "now worthless non-free software" that I can recommend to my friends' kids not to touch. Especially "M$" software, because we all know no one uses that anymore.

There is of course the difference between an educational software package that teaches, say, spelling, and "M$" Word, which is not educational tool. So I'm not sure how you can tie the two together?

BTW, Encarta - when it was released - was simply amazing. One of my nephews spent uncounted hours (this is 1997) exploring and learning Encarta. In fact, IIRC the article about Johann Sebastian Bach had a small sample of the Brandenburg concerto (BMW 1048), which he loved. That lead to my buying him a Bach CD "sampler", which got him on the road to other composers like Vivaldi, Brahms and Mozart.

I haven't seen Encarta in a while, and though teh interwebs have largely superceded its niche, I'm sure it's at least valuable from a production/quality/self-contained standpoint.

Honestly, I find it disturbing (if not downright pathetic) that someone would dismiss a product like Encarta (especially when it was first released) just because it comes from Microsoft.

i) No more heavy burden for students.

Laptops teach communications skills.

I've worked in K-12 education in the states for several years and have seen a few one-to-one laptop programs. One middle school purchased laptops for over a thousand students. The same middle school had only one full time technology 'professional'. I now work for a corporation where we have at least one desktop support person per floor. The school district attempted to supplement their small IT staff with what they call TSGs (Not quite sure what the acronym means). TSGs are full time teachers who have shown some limited proficiency with computers and desire a few hundred dollars more per month for a few hours work helping other teachers.

Another problem is, when schools are given money for programs like this they are given very rigid requirements about how that money can be spent. Hardware and software only. This leaves the IT department with pools of money that they must waste before a given deadline. 'Ooh, let's buy a whole bunch of 1 year licenses for adobe products that no one will ever use'. One year later a teacher has a bunch of illustrator documents they can't open because their school doesn't have licensed copies of the software. That's only one example of the kind of boneheaded decision making and incompetence shown by most schools.

The IT people and administration had no understanding of networked computing. Their mindset was a throwback to the Apple II per classroom days. For example, instead of setting up an disk image server (They could've at least blown some money on Ghost), all laptops were imaged by hand by connecting up firewire drives whenever that laptop was flagged as being messed up. These were Macs, how hard is it to set up a file server and have the laptops periodically rsync. Let me repeat, 1 IT person. There was also no audit trail; IPs were assigned by DHCP with short leases and they did not have a database of MAC addresses. If a student did something inappropriate the school had no way to prove it. One teacher I knew even resorted to running ettercap so he could see what his class was doing.

Many of the entrenched IT people would never succeed in this field outside of the K-12 education world and are aware of this. They fight any attempt by outsiders and other teachers to make the technology better and view additions to their staff as threats to subvert their power. These people may have been able to tread water with one or two workstations per classroom but with a thousand laptops they quickly drown. The school administration felt that hiring some outside company to set up the initial image and then throwing money at Apple for support was all they needed. I guess they didn't understand that Apple did not have the school's interest in mind but only wanted to sell more Apple stuff. 'Gee, these iPods are cool. You can make podcasts of your lessons and have all your kids listen to them while they're going home'. One of them even had the gall to say that, 'Apple Remote Desktop would not be appropriate for their site'. Not appropriate, you can't have a thousand computers and manage them like you only have 30.

The problem is this. You need people to run these programs before they even start. Before you get the laptops, you need months to plan a roll out and set up images for your school. Hiring an outside contractor will not get you what you need because they are geared towards business, they do not understand the unique requirements of schools. I spoke to the director of technology who managed the only successful one-to-one laptop program I've seen. He said to me, 'I very quickly realized that the first thing I needed to do was hire a couple of UNIX geeks'. Amen.

We started a one-to-one laptop program at a pilot middle school for our 7th graders. The biggest problem is the driving force(s) behind the program are only focused on the laptops. These people are not educators or technicians, they are politicians of one stripe or another. They don't realize that the price of the laptop itself is the *least* expensive item.

The teachers that were thrown into the program were like "Cool, I get a new laptop...", and that's about where it ended. They were worse than clueless when it came to using computers for even the simplest things, let alone how to properly integrate a laptop into their teaching environment and curriculum. Of course, they "budgeted" training into the project, but it amounted to about 3 hours of general computer familiarization. This is just enough time to make the computers the "focus" of the classroom (a distraction from learning) instead of an integrated learning tool. Giving every student a computer makes sense only when you change your teaching methods at a fundamental level. This requires a deep understanding of many facets of computers and computing; something today's teachers just don't have and colleges don't teach yet.

This is still ignoring the infrastructure aspect. There are the obvious things like having enough wireless access points to handle 100 computers within a close cluster of 3-4 classrooms (non-trivial - especially when the plan calls for "two airport extremes to provide wireless coverage" - yeah, what are you going to do with the other 80 laptops?). Then there are the racks of spare batteries and battery chargers that will be needed. Students will *not* show up to class with their laptops charged and you *cannot* have power cables stretching across the aisles. These high-speed chargers are expensive and so are the batteries.

Students now *require* their computers for every class - not just for "computer lab". This means that they *have to have* a computer with *their* data on it. If something breaks or gets corrupted they can't wait for several weeks to have their computer repaired (we have a 1,000-to-1 computer to technician ratio). This means that OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) work orders get priority and everything must be dropped to get a replacement to them (with their data on it). Expecting students to properly back up their data is a lot to ask. Making this a priority part of the educational process is apparently impossible (since the teachers don't even really understand it). Making sure that all the important data, settings, etc. are backed up in such a way so that transferring them to the stand-in replacement is quick and seamless is not impossible. It just becomes difficult deciding what to backup. How important are the 10 Gigabytes of iMovie projects? What about the 20 Gig of MP3s in iTunes or the Garageband projects? Assuming that some of these are legitimate and must be backed up, how do you do that over (totally saturated) wireless? Then where do you put that data? You can't put it in an accessible part of the file server - kids will be messing up their backups... Now you pretty much need a dedicated backup server with a huge amount of storage (which also needs to be backed up) to constantly be online.

Now we have to deal with damage and loss. It gets up to -70F in t