Why? Realistically, do they sit in a cupboard for the hols (honestly?)...
Clearly not! There are two issues. *People treat laptops worst than pool motor cars, they are usually subjected to even more careless misuse during the long teacher holidays and come back with damaged drives, cases & screens and it's not unusual to have to empty them of sand! legitimate use? Why should they and their kids mess up a resource that is then denied to others because of their stupidity and carelessness. If ya wanna mess with stuff (expensive kit that doesn't belong to you) , buy yer own! *The weakest point in ANY network is a laptop! The network's all cosy, clean, virus fee and sitting behind a fire wall, then suddenly meltdown! Some dipstick who knows best has loaded all kinds of everything onto the laptop and disabled the AV because their kids game doesn't like sharing a computer with any other software (because the rules don't apply to them) and then decided to plug it into the network - cool! We like to have a clean-up and software update while the machine is not needed, then we sit them in a secure cupboard so they're ready for use when really needed :-) Of course if we don't get them during the holiday, we have to do it during term time! And in any case, why should a sacred few have exclusive access to what is a shared school resource during the holiday? Come on you lot, who swans about in the school minibus and have all your fuel and repair bills paid for by the school?
I've often noticed many of those who work within 'fortress education' like to believe they are the only ones who know anything about IT.
Boring! (nothing personal David, but it's one of my bandwagons!) The BIG problem with IT is that everyone who owns a PC thinks they know everything about it. How sadly untrue this is (me included) that's not to say that we don't have our views! The sooner we remove PC's from the mass public and replace them with a 'box to do a job' the better (Computing used to be like witchcraft and I was one of the first advocates to get a computer into every home and demystify it, long before the PC - now I see the error of my ways) . The less tinkering and options to change the better. It you have a PlayStaion and a PC in your house, which is the most stable, the one you fiddle with or the one you can't. If we could stop the fiddling all would be smooth and headache free! Want a game? plug in a module, want a WP? plug in a module :-) I mean, tell me, why do you need to change the background colour of your folders and desktop? As for PC's in schools... The horses are slowing, time to jump off and take my tablets! :-)
Far too often I've seen educators completely ignore the norms of Netiquette, and try to put enforce their own way of doing things based on a 'theoretical' rather than a 'pragmatic user-tried-and-tested' perspective.
Often the solutions they come up with are painfully difficult to work with, and it can take a long time for them to wake up to the fact there's a far more user-friendly way of communicating that takes place beyond the boundaries of their cloistered world!
Sorry David, I'm agreeing with you.... Very true, I often see the kids do things I've never thought of trying, some I adopt, but mostly I try to show them the light. As I like to say, "you live and learn, then die and forget it all!" This multiple method approach has been both the guiding light and the downfall of the PC since it tends to both provide a soup that spawns evolution and one that produces lots of naff code. The view taken by apple was, "if you write a program, here's the code to close it - it works!" On the PC, there's more ways to close a program than you can shake a stick at. And when Mentor (dolphin) falls over, some wagg will tell you that you closed it the wrong way! What they meant was, that they put their "close down code" in the wrong place :-) Later Adrian