“Power to Learn” Laptop Initiative
in Georgia is planning a laptop initiative to give Apple iBooks to
63,000 students and teachers in Grades 6-12. The school board
votes March 9. They are in the midst of several community informational
sessions on the laptop proposal. The details are available on Cobb’s “Power to Learn” Web site.
Last Wednesday they had one of the informational meetings. See the Laptops in spotlight article in the AJC (Atlanta
Journal Constitution). I’ve been following with great interest the
discussions. It’s a hot issue - lots of pros and cons.
What I really love is that blogs are being used to promote learning and discussion about the issues.
The AJCblog Get Schooled, billed as “your source of information and conversation about education in Georgia and the nation” posts about Cobb’s Laptop Extravaganza
This is terrific though. One of the middle schools, Mabry Middle
School, is front and center in the discussion. The principal, Dr.
Tyson, is leading the discussion on his blog, From the Desk of Dr.Tyson. He praises one of his
students for speaking out at one of the meetings. (way to go!)
Here are a couple of excerpts from his post Tonight’s Informational Meeting.
I found it interesting that one of our students was so outraged by what
he found to be offensive and uniformed remarks made by one of the first
adults to speak in the open forum, that he immediately found Mrs.
DeBardeleben to ask her if he could speak at the microphone. She was a
little worried that he was too angry to speak. But our student held
back his anger and was able to effectively articulate why he believed
his having a laptop would enhance his achievement in school. Way to
go, Ben! I was proud of you.
Several of our students chose, on their own, to speak. And
every single one of them did an excellent job. As one very impressed
parent from another school told me, “Dr. Tyson, your students did you
proud tonight.” Yes, indeed, they did!
And another post, Please Feel Free to Print & Distribute, tells his readers to click on a picture to download a PDF document Mabry
has prepared for them. He goes on to ask his readers to print and distribute it to help inform
our community about The Power to Learn.
Plus, it appears all the teachers at this school have blogs. Go here for Check out the Mabry Teachers Blogs drop down menu.
Now I didn’t see any student blogs but you just have to think that’s
coming, especially if the laptop proposal goes through. Right now the
blogs appear to be mainly informational and for communication. The
students created a video explaining teacher use of the blogs.
You can be sure I’ll be following this, as well as all these new blogs. I love to see principals leading the way!
March 8th, 2005 at 11:27 am
Hey Anne. I enjoy your posts. Curiosity questions. You have been cited at http://www.terryfrazier.com as someone who may have a better solution on implementing the laptop initiative in Cobb. Are you for the idea of 1:1, and if you had to have a 1:1, what would you do differently than the people of Cobb?