Learning By Laptop

By Romesh Ratnesar

In the sixth-grade humanities class at New York City's Mott Hall, the noise level has reached cacophony. It's mostly animated chatter among the students as they put final touches on oral reports they will deliver in a few minutes. But another sound adds to the din: the staccato clicking of keys on computers. In this hard-knocks Washington Heights school, where a substantial number of the students qualify for free lunches, a hardwired revolution is taking shape. All the students in the class work on their own Toshiba laptops, cutting-edge machines bought by the school district last year and leased to the students for $30 a month. The reports they are about to present are high-speed, full-color Power Point jobs. And when teacher Janice Gordon wants her class's attention, she commands, "Screens at 45[degrees]!" At the end of class, the students will close their laptops, put them in backpacks and take them home.

In early 1995, Newt Gingrich casually suggested giving tax credits to poor families to buy laptop computers but soon backpedaled from the proposal and called it "a nutty idea." In this low-income Manhattan neighborhood, the idea of 11-year-olds toting $1,500 laptops to school is so nutty that the school district plans to expand its laptop program from Mott Hall's 30 sixth-graders to more than 200 students in the next month. Not long ago, laptop computers were a luxury even administrators couldn't afford; now the district wants to make them as common as spiral notebooks in its classrooms. Superintendent Anthony Amato predicts that laptop computers will be on most American students' desks within five years. "I'd put my reputation on it in a minute," he effuses. Since last year, Amato has fielded "calls from superintendents across the country" who want to replicate his district's model.

These days laptops, once the accessory of bicoastal businessmen, are right at home next to grade-schoolers' lunch boxes. A program launched by Toshiba and Microsoft that offers software-loaded laptops to schools at discount rates has grown from 52 public and private schools in 1996 to more than 170 this year. The private Cincinnati Country Day School requires all 500 of its students from grades 6 through 12 to carry laptops; the school pays half the cost, and parents chip in one-third. The public school district in Beaufort, S.C., leased laptops to 300 students last year, and after a swell of parent demands, expanded the program this fall to 1,000. In Texas, state-school-board president Jack Christie is pushing a proposal to junk textbooks and outfit 4 million students with portable computers complete with Internet access and a CD-ROM drive. He hasn't converted everyone yet, but vows it's "just a matter of time." Says Christie: "There are pockets of resistance--in the same way that people opposed the space program and said we couldn't get to the moon."

American schools are already spending more than $5 billion this year on high-tech gadgets and training, and many educators think laptops rank among the most promising classroom gadgets. For one, they can be used by students in any class, at any time of day--a significant improvement, experts say, over the prevalent computer-lab model, where students spend an hour a week "learning computers" in a room full of desktops. Unlike clunky desktop machines, laptops are compact and portable, facilitating group work and field research. Knowing that all kids will have computers with them at home, teachers say, gives them flexibility in assigning homework; many answer student questions long after the last bell rings, via E-mail.

In other serendipitous ways, laptops have altered the character of schools and their students that use them. At Mott Hall, Gordon says that since receiving their laptops last year, her sixth-graders "have become much more mature and articulate. They use those things the way adults use them." They even volunteer, she says, to do extra homework. Students at the Cincinnati Country Day School have set up round-the-clock tech-help desks in the hallways, assisting schoolmates in fixing crashed hard drives and finding lost files. And no one is more enthusiastic about laptop learning than parents; in communities like Washington Heights they have organized safety brigades to escort kids carrying computers from the school buses to their homes. In Little Falls, Minn.--a working-class district that distributed 276 laptops last year--parents volunteer and provide tutoring at local schools to defray the cost of their kids' machines.

Though schools are asking parents to foot part of the cost of laptops, they don't seem to mind, so far. Many feel a computer at home will give their kids a leg up, or at least an equal footing, in class.

It might--but so will books, skeptics say. Little evidence suggests that computers--or educational software, or the Internet--demonstrably enhance student learning. Says Stanford University Professor Larry Cuban, an authority on the history of technology in American education: "Anyone who tells you computers are more effective than anything else is either dumb or lying." Better technology doesn't necessarily make kids better students; good teachers and smart curriculums do. "Laptops are like the new electronic tablet notebook--they have good potential as a writing tool and a place to store information," says Allen Glenn, dean of the University of Washington's education school. "But as far as how you really integrate laptops into actual lessons, in a way that will help students understand their problems, that's still up for grabs."

Then there's the cost. Good portable computers can range from $500 to $2,000--and don't expect high-tech companies to simply hand them out. The Microsoft-Toshiba laptop program has stoked the brand loyalty of more than 10,000 students. Apple peddles the eMate, a laptop created in 1996 specifically for kiddie consumers, which goes for $650. NetSchools, a company based in Mountain View, Calif., started up last year to sell one product: a $1,600 portable computer custom-built for students that comes with an infrared connection to the school's computer network, a water-resistant keyboard and a built-in security device. That's an expense still too great for many cash-strapped districts. "Schools that bought into the earlier generation of technology are stuck," says Cuban. "The capital investment in desktops makes it difficult to buy this new thing called laptops." Harvard's Martha Stone Wiske suggests that schools purchase "a rolling cart of 10 or 15 laptops," rather than one for every student, and offer them to different classes when teachers develop lessons that can incorporate the machines. That way, Wiske says, schools can both save cash and maximize the effectiveness of laptops--by making the computers subordinate to what the computers are used to teach.

So it's too soon to tell whether laptops will become classroom fixtures (like calculators) or fads (whatever happened to Trapper Keepers?). But the legions of the faithful are growing. At Mott Hall, many of the sixth-graders have adoringly given their computers nicknames. Jose Ramirez, shy and bespectacled, struggled to fit in with his classmates before the arrival of laptops. Since then he's become something of a sage. On this afternoon, he's floating among the different groups in the classroom, peering at the work on their screens, shooting down technical troubles. "It's more fun for me now with my classmates, for sure," he says, nodding. At the front of the room, the students take turns projecting reports from their laptops onto a large white screen. A shaft of sunlight streaming through the windows makes the reports look a little faint. "We normally save these for cloudy days," Gordon jokes. Jose's group goes last and offers a presentation on geothermal energy that would impress in a corporate boardroom. When the students finish, their teacher nods approvingly. The class applauds. After a while, you hardly notice the glare.