Laptop School Progress Self-assessment
By Gary S. Stager
www.stager.org

When I began working with laptops schools in 1990, I fully expected schools to evolve in the following way within a decade. How did we do? How did your school do?

Read the following checklist and determine if your reality has exceeded my dream.

The easy stuff

• Basic productivity tool fluency would be assumed
• Electronic publishing of student work would be commonplace
• Electronically-mediated parent/teacher communication
• Teachers using the computer for personal productivity/school paperwork
• Every child and teacher would have a personal computer
• We would stop referring to computers as technology
• I.T. would cease to exist as a school subject

The hard stuff
Kids would be:

• All laptop owners
• Composing music
• Writing powerful computer programs
• Freely communicating online
• Building robots
• Conducting scientific investigations with probeware
• Publishing in a variety of convergent media

School leaders would be:

• Using computers in personally powerful ways
• Supporting the imaginative use of emerging technology
• Participating in the professional development they impose on teachers
• No longer using computers to quiz or test students

The really hard stuff

• Principals would no longer be able to get their photo in the newspaper just for standing next to a kid and a computer
• School would be learner-centered and educators would be able to articulate what that means
  School leaders would spend less time making computer deals and more time collaborating with other learners
• Students would be able to program and construct their own software tools
• The supremacy of curriculum would be abandoned & no one would speak of delivery
• School leaders would join the community of practice
• Kids would collaborate with other kids and experts around the world
• Computer science would be offered in most secondary schools

The really really hard stuff

• Multi-age interdisciplinary ‘classrooms’ would be widespread
• External forms of assessment would be replaced by more effective humane forms of authentic assessment
• Kids would spend less time in school
• Schools would stop viewing the needs of children as an impediment to the enterprise
• There would be far fewer technology coordinators in schools