Hooray for Laptops!

The article “Assessment made Easy” by Andrew A. Zucker demonstrates how well the school, Denver School of Science and Technology (DSST) is doing with technology. This is a school that had $1million gift from Hewlett-Packard. This school had a one-to-one laptop for students. Although there are other schools that have this, these students seem to be doing very well all around. For example, they have great test score and great outcomes with college acceptances. They are also now getting more money to be a school to get studied on their teaching techniques with this technology.

This school is doing very well because there are many positive things they are doing with all the students having computer access. To start off with, the laptops are fully loaded which is beneficial to the students since many of them are from low-income families. I believe this would defeat the purposes if students go laptops and had to buy programs with money they don’t have. There is also a lot that teachers are doing to take advantage of this technology. They can now grade tests and better assess students to give them better feedback and faster. This is important because teachers can better spot out what the students need help with. What I liked, in addition is that teachers have choices in how they would like to use the technology.

I think in a perfect world, all students would have access to such great technology and not have to worry about having to afford it. I would really like to have these kinds of opportunities because there is so much you could do as a teacher when grades can be graded almost instantly. There is also a better and faster way to communicate with students. So much can be done, but we have to make sure that we can make it relevant and interesting, while educating.