One-to-One Laptops

If you read last week's blog post, you will know that I advocated for the use of Chromebooks in schools and demonstrated all the different ways that they can provide beneficial educational resources for our students. The students in the school that I work at have one-to-one devices.. Each student is assigned their own Chromebook that they use for all of their classes throughout the day. This is a Title 1 middle school. Smith, et. al. (2022) essentially referred to the benefits of having one-to-one laptops especially for students like mine who live in a more rural area and with a higher poverty rate due to lack of experience and access to technology and internet access. While I don't disagree with some of the assumptions, nearly every student in my classes has a cellphone even if they don't have clean clothes. Another way the experience in the article differs from my own is that it was studying high school students who should inevitably be slightly more mature.

While I do appreciate and think Chromebooks should be used to teach students to use technology and to aid in instruction, I would like to play devil's advocate as well. While the use of Chromebooks and technology in some classrooms, like my own, is highly necessary, (see photo on the left.) there are also times that like Swallows (2015) infers, I have seen teachers allow the technology to cause their lessons to become stagnant and rely too heavily on educational software. Students frequently using apps like Dreambox or IXL to teach them math and ELA, and lacking the creativity that gets them engaged with their learning. When used correctly, this technology can be a huge asset, but I do not think that it needs to be the end-all, be-all.

Also to be noted, in a middle school setting, sometimes Chromebooks become a discipline issue. No matter how much monitoring software you use, they will find a way to work around it and view things they shouldn't. I am the technology person for my school and the photo below is of only two of the Chromebooks I have collected this year for repair. As Zahn and Geho (2023) iterate in their ABC News article, the number of Chromebooks that are sent off for repair each year is astounding. There are times when I have no additional Chromebooks to exchange for broken ones. In those cases, it puts the teacher in a tight spot, because they planned their lesson utilizing the technology. "If schools don't have excess Chromebooks that they can hand to someone," Millman began, "then those kids effectively can't learn the same way the rest of the classroom can." (Zahn&Geho, 2023).

For these reasons, I would advocate for classroom sets of Chromebooks that never leave the room and are only used for that class. I firmly believe this would reduce the number of Chromebook repairs, because students would no longer have them in the gym, on the bus, in the baseball dugout in their bag, etc. I also think it would allow teachers access to the technology for their lesson plans, but may make them less dependent on them. I know not every school is alike. So many factors must be considered based on each individual school's population and needs. Very little we do in education can be one-size-fits-all and the students you are serving and their specific needs have to be first and foremost.

Does anyone else have a similar experience?

References:

Meredith Swallow (2015) The year-two decline: exploring the incremental experiences of a 1:1 technology initiative, Journal of Research on Technology in Education, 47:2,122-137, DOI: 10.1080/15391523.2015.999641

Smith, D., Milburn, S., Esener, Y. & Colby, D. (2022). Teacher perception of the one-to-one laptop implementation: suggestions for the role of school librarians. School Library Research, 25. www.ala.org/aasl/slr/volume25/smith-milburn-esener-colby

Zahn, M., & Geho, L. (2023, September 2). Google’s Chromebooks thrive in US classrooms but generate waste, costs, critics say. ABC News. https://abcnews.go.com/Business/googles-chromebooks-thrive-us-classrooms-generate-waste-costs/story?id=102844506