The Federal Labor Party is trying to save its skin on education, its “last refuge”, yet this is perhaps its most vulnerable flank.
I’m a father of six with three children in high school, four next year, and I want to raise the issue of “one laptop per child”. This program, provided at vast expense to tax payers, is a farce. The only people who benefit from the program are bad teachers who are content that disruptive pupils are fully occupied playing games on their laptops and not disrupting the lesson.
I struggled with this issue myself for a while, but decided in the end that these kids needed encouragement, not diversion. Laptops in school are too often utilised as baby-sitters rather than educational aids.
But what about the issue of the actual benefits of school laptops as pedagogical aids? I have it on good authority (my own kids) that they’re redundant; they’re prone to accidental or malicious damage and they’re hardly even used for practical purposes.
What’s more, kids’ laptops are attracting new fees at a rate roughly proportional to their increasing exclusivity. It’s no longer “one laptop per child” it seems, they’re rationed out according to some arbitrary (elitist?) criteria, though it comes down to funding and a looming election.
Kids no longer use textbooks either. We are asked to pay $150 per student for virtual textbooks (on the laptop) yet my grade ten son tells me there are none.
In fact the same son tells me he wants to turn his laptop in—to dispose of it ethically—that is once he gets it back from rehab. It has a “cracked screen”, he tells me, adding that this is an exceedingly common fate due either to malicious intent or acts of God. But it’s a dust-collector anyway.
I’m writing then to ask after other people’s experience with this Labor “initiative”. I suspect I’ve barely scratched the surface of what looks to me like a scandalous waste of money that actually works against education
I might add that I’m a committed Labor supporter. But I call a spade a spade.

The supplier of the computers will make a fortune if not on the first sale on support or ancillary items also the middle man will probably arrange good commissions and kickbacks.

Another labor VOTE BUYING exercise.

Just dropped in to read but found no room to agree.
IF and some doubt exists, teachers are using them like this sack them!

What a geek is the minister in charge of education, the wrong bloke in the wrong job. Garrett once threatened to resign if he was dropped from cabinet, Gillard should have taken up his offer. Come next election I fully expect "The Rock Star" to get rolled in Kingsford-Smith. Labor have failed on education, failing to adequately fund disadvantaged schools, whilst poring millions into elitists private schools.

Paul1405 - Juliar has trouble finding money for our schools BUT gave $500m to build 2,000 Islamic “madrassahs” in Indonesia.

When a country's education model is flawed, randomly raining technology down upon it merely exacerbates the dysfunction, and probably leads to a sense of less continuity and greater confusion amongst the students.

(Just wanted to add that since we homeschool, my son had to save up for his ipad, doing a few chores during the week and banking his pocket money. It took him most of a year to save up, but the exercise in delayed gratification and the eventual reward was the best lesson he's gained from the contraption:)