Classes sit pretty with new laptops

Thursday, October 19, 2000
By ROSELYN TANTRAPHOL

SPRINGFIELD   —   With a few keystrokes on her laptop, 8-year-old Mallory Kakley sat back and watched history in motion.

"This is the continental drift," Mallory said, her eyes glued to a shifting map on the monitor. "It's showing us what it was like in the beginning and how the continents are drifting all over the Earth."

All around her in the Brunton Elementary School third-grade classroom yesterday, students were clicking and double-clicking, playing spelling games or looking at science-based Web sites.

While Mallory's classroom experience may be more advanced than that of most elementary and secondary students now, state officials hope to make laptops the norm at the university level. Citing the need to give students computer skills, the Board of Higher Education this week approved a proposal to require all students at state colleges and the University of Massachusetts to own a laptop.

Brunton is the city's first, and so far only, laptop school. It has been advertised as the place where every student from kindergarten through the fifth grade has use of a laptop for school and home, but a district-wide financial problem is preventing kindergarten pupils and first- and second-graders from getting laptops this school year.

Students in upper grades were supplied with laptops during the last school year, while those in lower grades were scheduled to receive them this fall.

To make sure that the machines no sale value, the district leased specially designed laptops that lack hard drives and must be periodically connected to the school's servers to work.

But teachers and administrators say their academic value is high. They say that students pick up computer skills and get more up-to-date information with their Internet access than they would relying solely on textbooks.

Assistant Principal Kathleen F. Laramee said classroom laptops are the wave of the future. "The technology is not going to go away," she said. "It's just going to get more and more sophisticated, and we have to have our children prepared."

The School Department says it's working with the company that provides the laptops, NetSchools Inc., on a way to get a batch of computers for kindergartners and first-graders to share at school despite the budget problems. Officials are also looking into whether the company could provide a grant to assist the school in getting a laptop to every second-grader later this school year.

Teresa M. Dion, president of the school's parent-teacher organization, described parents as anxious, but hopeful that the matter will be resolved.

"I don't see anybody yelling and screaming," she said.

Dion said her own first-grader, Kathleen, has a computer to work with at home and isn't noticing the absence of her promised laptop just yet.

Laura McKenzie, a parent of a second- and a fifth-grader at Brunton, said she is impressed with the computers skills her older son has acquired using his laptop.

But she counts herself among a minority of parents who are actually reluctant to have younger students lug laptops home. "I think they need to spend time on the basics," she said. "At this point, they're still developing their penmanship and their reading and writing skills."

© 2000 UNION-NEWS. Used with permission.

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