The Handheld-Centric Classroom

The challenge: No access and no impact

The sun will rise tomorrow, and computing technology has profoundly changed our daily lives. Two absolute truisms. But one area that has not been touched by the computing revolution is K–12 education: by and large, the K–12 classroom looks and works as it has for the past 250 years. Indeed, except in isolated cases, the impact of computing technology on K–12 over the past 25 years has been, to a first order approximation, zero.

Why? Don’t blame the teachers, society’s favorite scapegoat. No, the reason for the lack of impact is the lack of access. Even today, 2004, the ratio of students to Internet-connected computers is 9:1 in urban settings. Yes, we hear that 98% of U.S. K–12 schools are connected to the Internet, but all that means is that there is at least one connection in the building—and there is no requirement that it work with any consistency. Of the 4000 teachers we have surveyed across the country, 65% report that their students use the Internet less than 15 minutes a week! Why? 60% report that they have one or no computer in their classrooms. Even after spending billions of dollars on technology for K–12, access to computers in U.S. schools is abysmal.

The solution: The handheld-centric classroom

Finally, however, the educators in the U.S. have come to the realization that students need 1:1 access—each child needs his/her own personal computer for use 24/7. Politicians, ever willing to exploit a trend, have seized the 1:1 movement and are now pushing Laptop Initiatives in their states. In 2001, Maine gave a laptop to each seventh grader. That set off a landslide of me-too-ism with Laptop Initiatives in Michigan, Texas, New Hampshire, New Mexico, etc. (eSchool News, 9/5/2003, “N.H. follows Maine’s lead with school laptop plan.”)

Politicians are in it for the short-term; they are not worried that the laptop model can’t scale. Having the state guarantee funds for only the first of the four-year lease payment on a laptop is not going to sit well with fiscally responsible school administrators. And, unless states are willing to engage in a Ponzi scheme of significant proportions, there is no way to buy new computers in successive years for the other grades. New Hampshire’s Governor Craig Benson said, “Once the school year is done, the computers will remain in the classroom and not move on to eighth grade with the student. This way we whet their appetite for learning.” While the Governor might well know governing, he certainly doesn’t understand children: taking computers away from the students who have had them for a year will do just the opposite of what the Governor predicts!

Laptop Initiatives are a necessary evil. These programs are way stations on the road to the real answer: Provide each and every one of the 55,000,000 children in America with a personal computer. Low-cost, mobile, handheld computers are the only way to achieve 1:1 in the near term—and that could happen, literally, tomorrow! If the U.S. ordered 55,000,000 handhelds, you’d better believe that manufacturers would produce wireless networked, memory-rich, super-screened devices for about $100 each. It’s mind-boggling to imagine each and every child has their own personal, handheld computer.

In what we call the “handheld-centric classroom,” where each child has a handheld, those one or two computers in the back of the room are no longer teacher-headache makers, but are critically important. They now serve as syncing stations to back up the handhelds, and as Internet stations, where children download reformatted Web pages to their handhelds to be read off-line. Finally, K–12 can leverage the investment in PCs.

Fig. 1: Inventor’s Project Template. Matt Dylan’s fifth-grade teacher beamed this template to all the students in the class.