Why one school district decided giving laptops to students is a terrible idea

A really fascinating piece about all the problems that Hoboken had with their one-laptop-per-child program.  The quote listed below describes the problems with breakage and pornography.  The article goes on to describe problems with too little memory, bad educational software, wireless network overload, anti-virus expense, and teacher professional learning costs.  I firmly believe in the vision of one-laptop-per-student.  I also firmly believe that it’s crazy-expensive and hard to make work right, especially in large school districts.

We had “half a dozen kids in a day, on a regular basis, bringing laptops down, going ‘my books fell on top of it, somebody sat on it, I dropped it,’ ” said Crocamo. Screens cracked. Batteries died. Keys popped off. Viruses attacked. Crocamo found that teenagers with laptops are still… teenagers. “We bought laptops that had reinforced hard-shell cases so that we could try to offset some of the damage these kids were going to do,” said Crocamo. “I was pretty impressed with some of the damage they did anyway. Some of the laptops would come back to us completely destroyed.”

Crocamo’s time was also eaten up with theft. Despite the anti-theft tracking software he installed, some laptops were never found. Crocamo had to file police reports and even testify in court.

Hoboken school officials were also worried they couldn’t control which websites students would visit. Crocamo installed software called Net Nanny to block pornography, gaming sites and Facebook. He disabled the built-in web cameras. He even installed software to block students from undoing these controls. But Crocamo says students found forums on the Internet that showed them how to access everything.“There is no more determined hacker, so to speak, than a 12-year-old who has a computer,” said Crocamo.

via Why a New Jersey school district decided giving laptops to students is a terrible idea | The Hechinger Report.