We gave out the laptops on Friday, and it was one of those days that will live in SLA lore. We had an Apple senior engineer, a district technology manager, our sys-admin, our development coordinator, our technology coordinator, several students and — at the moment when we were thinking there’d be no way we’d get it done — two Beacon graduates who showed up to help (thanks Jeremy and Stephen, you were amazing!) all working like crazy to configure 115 laptops by hand, because we don’t have the final image made. We got them out, ready to go, and we’ve developed a good system such that the kids will have them while we finalize the image, configure the OSX server, etc… and then, when we have to re-image, the kids can push their files onto the server before we blow out the new image.

And now that the computers are here, some questions that have been nagging me for months will be put into practice…
– Is it enough to just put a ton of power surge strips in classrooms, and open the power carts at lunch, and hope the kids share when they need to plug in or will we need to figure out a more formal process for charging?
– Will kids police themselves when it comes to using the laptops productively enough so that the teachers don’t waste too much time having to do it themselves? (And anyone who thinks this might be harsh, I know how my attention span could wane in grad school last time when I could bring the laptop into a wireless environment. I don’t expect kids to be more focused students at 15 than I was at 33. Maybe they will be.)
– Will we as teachers be able to keep up with all the ways the kids figure out to use them? Can we build the server-side tools they need quickly enough?

And we are slowly but surely building the server environment. I keep finding myself missing the tools I built over eight years at Beacon, especially the parent portal, as it’s proving to be difficult to find the time to get into Moodle and write a program to pull assignments out. (Any programmers out there want to take a stab at it?) So now I’m trying to steal a few hours at night, when Theo is awake, but in either the bouncy seat or laying in my lap in such a way that I can type, so that I can take some of the tools I built and make the code relevant to SLA.

But there’s also a longer post that I need to write — one that speaks about how it’s not about the laptops, and how it is…. about how the SLA teachers teach in such a way that the spirit and energy is there without the laptops… and how the laptops will take what’s going on in our classes and go so much further.

We’re a week and a half in, and everyone, kids and teachers and administrators and parents, seems to see the potential and how we’re making strides to reach that potential. Now that we’ve got the tools, we can really see what we can do.