DOE must upgrade thinking and implement laptop plan

I feel bad when my 15-year-old grandson trudges off to high school with a backpack heavy with textbooks, notebooks and other school supplies.

I lifted it to hand to him, and it must have weighed 40 pounds.

I told him, "When your sister (now 8) is your age, all she’ll carry is a 1-pound tablet computer that holds all of her textbooks, notebooks, lessons and calculators."

Well, maybe not after the Department of Education chokes the idea in red tape.

I applauded Gov. Neil Abercrombie’s call in his State of the State speech for supplying all Hawaii public school students with laptops — assuming that by "laptops" he meant the emerging tablets and not high-maintenance Windows and Mac clamshells that are becoming outdated.

But our school bureaucracy made clear the advance won’t happen any time soon.

The DOE said a laptop for every student would take a decade to implement and cost up to $63 million a year — and then $50 million a year more to sustain.

There’s no question computers for all would be expensive; a measure in the state House for a $1 million pilot project involving 1,500 students would cost $666 per student, translating to $113 million for the state’s 170,000 students.

What’s baffling is how DOE gets from there to 10 years, $600 million and counting.

It appears DOE’s thinking is led by information technology people instead of educators, and techs are stuck on complex Windows and Mac notebooks that require intense training and large-scale technical support to deal with endless things that go wrong with PC hardware and software.

But most schools, computer companies and textbook publishers are moving away from this old technology in favor of simpler tablets such as the iPad and Android devices.

These have intuitive interfaces that many students and teachers already know because they’re the same as the ubiquitous smartphones they use.

In addition to an easy learning curve that slashes training costs, the tablets have no moving parts, need little programming and offer free automatic backups and software updates, meaning minimal technical support.

These devices can replace textbooks, photocopied lessons, paper tests and notebooks — and give students a world of information at their fingertips. Myriad apps provide interactive learning experiences that engage students in mind-blowing new ways.

Mid-Pacific Institute skipped the bureaucracy and decided to just do it, recently announcing that iPads will be given to all students and teachers and integrated throughout the curriculum next school year.

A private school with 1,500 students is different from a public system of 170,000, but it undercuts DOE’s boast that its monolithic statewide structure keeps everybody on the same page.

In these fast-moving times, everybody turning pages at a glacial pace is no advantage.

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Reach David Shapiro at volcanicash@gmail.com or blog.volcanicash.net.