[IAEP] Handling loss of educational tools

[Samuel Klein]

Every child and class faces this.  In my fairly well-funded public
elementary and middle school, I must have had a handful of classes in
which I didn't have my own textbook for weeks, and had to share / had
nothing to take home.  In other cases, there weren't enough of the
latest materials and I had to use old or damaged books, or borrow the
teacher's book.

Centralizing a lot of interesting activity on a single device/book
makes the impact greater; I always had other classes where this wasn't
an issue.  So this speaks to avoiding single points of failure.

I can see a partial solution where if you lose your materials you no
longer have them to take home with you (so you don't go on losing them
every week) but have access to ones you can use in school.  In my
school we paid for replacements; it's more difficult if
students/families can't do that.

SJ


On Wed, Feb 25, 2009 at 12:26 AM, John Watlington <wad at laptop.org> wrote:
>
> On Feb 24, 2009, at 12:19 PM, Albert Cahalan wrote:
>
>> What do you do when a kid loses his XO? Does he just miss out
>> on an education, or does the school stick to XO-free lessons?
>> How many replacements are you going to give him?
>
> What do you do when a monitor/keyboard breaks, leaving you
> with 24 seats for a class of 25 ?   Or worse, a CPU unit, leaving
> you with 20 seats for a class of 25 ?
>
> This is a problem faced in every deployment of technology in
> schools.   What about the kid that lost his textbook(s) ?
>
> I'd love to hear some educators thoughts on handling this dilemma.
>
> Cheers,
> wad
>
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