Dateline: 04/30/97 - by Walter H. Horowitz, Vice President, NoteSys, Inc.
In April 1996, representatives of a few schools around the United States met in Seattle
to listen to eight Australian educators tell their story about the new way they were using
computers. This year, over five hundred educators met in 
Atlanta to hear the story of how the seeds planted the year
before had sprouted into programs in 52 schools around the United States. Programs where
each child has his or her own laptop computer to use both in school and at home twenty
four hours a day and seven days a week.
The schools that came to tell their story were a diverse group. We heard presentations from small schools in rural areas, schools in the suburbs and schools in the inner city. There were both private schools and public schools; schools from affluent communities and schools from very low income neighborhoods. The universal message was that they felt that the laptop computer program was working in their school and that they felt that it gave their students a significant advantage.
While both Microsoft and Toshiba, the two large corporations supporting this program, were there, they took a back seat at this conference while the schools took center stage. For four days, leaders from the existing laptop schools told the group their message. We learned the details of planning and implementation. There was no one formula, the size of the initial program, the financial details and methods were as diverse as the schools themselves.
It was easy to believe that this program would work at a private school like The Cincinnati Country Day School. It was much easier to be a skeptic as Anthony Amato, Superintendent of District 6 in New York City took the stage. District 6 is in Harlem, where 90% of the students who attend the schools come from families below the poverty level. They have a very large bilingual population. More than one person told me that tears welled up in their eyes as Mr. Amato told the story of a mother of a large family living in a one bedroom apartment. In spite of their poverty, she is finding the $35 a month that she needs to finance her half of the cost of the laptop computer for her son who is in Janice Gordon's class at Mott Hall I.S. Her son is both learning how to use his Toshiba notebook computer and helping his mother learn too.
We heard similar success stories from other schools. Virginia Boris from the Clovis Unified School district told us how it was working in a poor agricultural community in California where many of the students are children of migrant workers. Herman Gaither, Superintendent of Schools from Beaufort County, South Carolina told us how they had formed a foundation to pay for half of the cost of their laptop computers.
Is it really working? Studies are underway to formally measure the results over one and two year periods and these results aren't in. However, the preliminary results are impressive. At Mott Hall, the unit tests for the laptop class were superior to the other three 5th grade classes in the school. Cory Fields, Superintendent of Zion-Benton, Il. schools said that their program had "transformed the life of sophomores at risk."
