10/10/2005, 11:50am, EDT
Monday, October 10th
Maine's middle-school iBook program to end in 2006
The program started in January of 2002, and while test results showed no significant changes after the laptops had been passed around, David Silvernail of the Maine Education Policy Research Institute said test results don't speak to the program's success or failure, noting that stories from the classrooms are where to look. "Are they learning differently? Are they learning more? We have evidence that that is the case," Silvernail said.
Seventh-grade science teacher Kelly Fitz-Randolph at King Middle School in Portland said: "They still need to know how to use a microscope, but (the laptop provides) instant learning, things you would have had to wait for, things you couldn't get, you can better teach in better time -- with hands on and eyes on –- than you could without the tool."
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I don't know, maybe there were more reports of kids playing Doom or something and the article didn't bother to mention it, but it seems to me like kids using their laptops to do those sort of things shouldn't be cause for alarm ...
Unless they were using the laptop to surf porn during class time, I can't possibly see how these non-educational usages are reasons to discontinue a program that is obviously popular with the students & teachers involved. Sadly, the critics are usually louder than the success stories.