Laptop computers are going into the backpacks of children in the Little Rock School District.
The state’s largest school district will assign about 800 Hewlett-Packard laptops to fourth- and fifth-graders at four schools - Forest Park, Gibbs Magnet, Otter Creek and Roberts - by early February.
The computer distribution will expand to the fourth- and fifth-graders at eight to 10 additional schools in 2014-15, and the devices will be in the hands of fourth- and fifth-graders in all of the district’s elementary schools in 2015-16. Thereare also plans to provide devices to each student at the proposed Forest Heights Science Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) Academy and the Geyer Springs High Ability Academy if those school redesign plans are approved by the School Board.
The state’s largest district of 25,000 students is not the first school system in the state to institute some form of a one-to-one student-to-computer ratio. Statewide, there are about three students for every one computing device, according to the Arkansas Department of Education.
But the elementary school initiative planned for Little Rock is new enough that it is generating a lot of questions and much planning about how to best use the laptops to promote student achievement at school and at home, while also minimizing damage, loss and inappropriate browsing.
The Little Rock School District’s new superintendent, Dexter Suggs, was a leader in getting computers into the hands of students when he worked in Indianapolis public schools. Even before starting the chief executive’s job in Little Rock in July, he was talking about providing Little Rock pupils with computers to better tailor instruction and enable them to learn 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
“It’s actually a digital conversion - transforming the way we educate our kids in the Little Rock School District. It is about transforming the way we do business,” Suggs said.
“It’s bigger than one-toone,” he added.
The four schools testing the initiative were purposely selected because of their high-achieving pupils and to avoid overloading low-achieving, state-labeled “priority” schools that are working with consultants and taking other steps to improve, Suggs said.
“Putting a platform of this nature into a school is kind of hard,” he said about integrating personal computersinto the instruction. “To put it in on top of what our priority schools already have to do, it can be overwhelming.”
That was a lesson he learned in Indianapolis, he said.
“That’s why we do the pilot instead of just dumping everything in,” he said.
“You have to take a lot of things into consideration. You have to think about the infrastructure, you have to think about the human capital, you have to think about how this will look in this particular environment. We have implemented this across the nation, but how will it look in this particular environment?
“You have to ask about true integration - you don’t want to continue to do the same things you were doing with paper and pencil. Phasing it in is a smart thing to do but, again, I didn’t know that when we first began.”
Fourth- and fifth-grade teachers, media and technology specialists, and principals at the four pilot schools already have received theirlaptops and have been undergoing training at the district’s Technology Center, at the Metropolitan Technical Skills Center, in preparation for computer distribution to pupils.
That training has focused on familiarizing the faculty with using Gaggle, an online tool designed for student email accounts and other educational uses.
The faculty training also has introduced technology standards and presented ways to better integrate the use of technology into instruction. Instead of printing out a worksheet to be completed by the student using a pencil or writing an essay using paper and pencil, pupils might fill in the worksheet online or write the essay online, make an audio recording of the essay or produce a video documentary based on their research.
“We don’t want teachers to do the same thing they have always done,” Barbara Williams, district director ofinstructional technology, said about teaching and student assignments. “We used to write on an overhead projector because that was the technology we had. But now we don’t want you to type something on your laptop and project it onto a electronic white board for students to see,” she said. “We want the interactivity. We want the students to respond, to be involved.”
“I plan to use it for a lot of project-based learning to try to create some online research projects so that students can get involved and get some of the career skills they will need down the line,” said Roberts fourth-grade teacher Amy Braswell. “We can integrate better with the computer as a tool. We don’t have to switch out textbooks.We have the whole world at their fingertips.”
Jill Johnson, also a fourthgrade teacher at Roberts, sees the laptop initiative as aiding in teaching the new Common Core math and language arts standards, in particular, and providing a resource for all subject areas.
Johnson said her classroom currently has a few desktop computers for children to use, and there are carts of laptops and tablets that can be moved from classroom to classroom for pupil use.
But that requires scheduling to make sure that a cart is available when needed and not in use in another classroom, Johnson said.
“Having immediate access - for everyone to have one at the time you need it - that’s going to be very beneficial,” she said.
The pilot program is expected to cost the district about $1 million, Williams said. That’s for the laptops, the software, cases, plus the in-house staff training and parent information sessions, which will take place in January before children are assigned their computers.
Each pupil in the two grades at the pilot schools will be assigned a laptop and laptop case, just as they are assigned textbooks. Fourth- and fifth-grade-level textbooks will be loaded onto the laptops.
“We aren’t going to takethe physical textbook away, but students will have the option,” she said about using the electronic versions.
The pupils will be able to take the devices home once they are introduced and the pupils are instructed on operation and care of the machines.
Teachers are responsible for monitoring how children use the devices at school. Teachers will be aided by the school district’s security walls and filters that would allow access to the National Geographic website, for example, but not to YouTube unless the students are going through Gaggle, which will allow access to student-appropriate videos.
Parents are responsible for how the devices are used by their children at home, where some of the same filters and security walls may or may not be in place, Williams said.
As for what happens when the devices are broken or lost: “We have the best warranty in the world,” Williams said. “The cost includes repair,” most of which will be done through the Little Rock-based Complete Computing. “We don’t have to send it anywhere.”
The children will keep the computers for the period they are in elementary school. The elementary-school children in the pilot program will take the devices home with them at night, but they will not keep the devices over the summer vacation, nor will pupils take them to middle school, most of which already have classroom sets of computer tablets in the math and English classes, Williams said.
Eventually all students in kindergarten through 12th grades will be assigned their own tablets or laptops.
“We’re looking forward to it making a difference in the way students are learning, Williams said about the goals for the initiative.
Suggs said the initiative is part of the bridge to what will eventually be a paperless environment.
“We have to phase it so everyone understands what we are doing and no one gets lost,” he said.
Front Section, Pages 1 on 12/27/2013