Netbooks May Make Notebooks Passe for Students

When Aliza Malyani sits down in her chemistry class at Niles North High School, she pulls out a small Dell netbook computer along with her graphing calculator and notebooks.

When her teacher, Mike Boll, lectures from a PowerPoint presentation, she calls his slides up on her netbook from the website where he has posted them. Then, if he goes too fast, she can use the slides on her computer to catch up.

“Sometimes he goes really fast,” said Malyani, a sophomore. “Then I can just stay on the slide I’m on until I’m finished.”

Malyani carries one of the hundreds of netbooks in use by students in Niles Township High School District 219. The , as well as to a handful of older students.

Malyani got one because she is a tech leader, spending several free periods each week assisting students when they have trouble with their computers.

While many classes are run pretty much the way the students’ parents might remember–Malyani’s Spanish class on a recent Friday consisted of class discussion and reading from a Spanish novel–some of them incorporate technology in new and innovative ways. The netbook program, which will be complete in three years, helps students and teachers collaborate, take advantage of web-based resources and communicate with one another.

The school board approved spending $411,883 on 1,250 Dell netbooks and 1,000 netbook cases for next year’s freshmen. At that point, half the school’s students will have computers that have smaller features, such as a 10-inch screen.

Malyani said that in many cases, the teachers are ahead of the students.

“A lot of my teachers ask me for help,” she said. “But they need to learn because everybody’s going to be using them in three years.”

Abraham Sihweil, student technology and application support specialist at Niles North, said the technology office runs training sessions for teachers. Those who complete the sessions receive laptops loaded with the same software the students are using, including Linux’s Ubuntu operating system and a variety of Google’s web-based applications. Ubuntu, Sihweil said, has the twin virtues of being inexpensive and not prone to viruses.

Eventually, the netbooks are expected to replace many hard-copy texts and allow for near-paperless classrooms.

But the school is not quite there yet.

Student printing stations allow netbook users to make hard copies of their work; so far this year, they have printed roughly 10 pages for each laptop in a student’s hands. Most teachers either have assignments e-mailed or simply look at the students’ work online.

For that to work, each student must always have his or her netbook available. The technology help desk, which Sihweil runs and where Malyani volunteers, can fix most things. Student assistants can re-image the hard drives – return them to the way they were when the students receive them – in about 10 minutes.

Most can also replace keyboards and motherboards, he said, and they chat with Dell representatives online to decide when a netbook needs to be sent in for service or a part must be ordered. Warranties cover the netbooks for three years, but not if it is damaged by misuse, Sihweil said.

Cracked screens might be the most common problem caused by carelessness, but not necessarily because students drop them.

“A lot of the times, they put the netbook in their backpacks and then pile all their textbooks in on top,” he said. “It’s something they have to learn. But that will get better too when we use more online books.”

In Malyani’s English class on April 29, the students gathered in one of the computer labs because most of them do not have netbooks. A substitute teacher assigns them seats at the long rows of desktop workstations in alphabetical order, and distributes a worksheet with questions about George Orwell’s book “1984.”

The worksheet has also been e-mailed to each student, so they call it up on their computers in Google Docs, a a web-based word processing software that allows them to share documents. The teacher has already divided them into work groups; members of each group share an electronic worksheet, typing in answers for the whole group to see and to comment on.

“You get so much of a better grade this way,” Malyani said, "because students can challenge and correct one another."

Her teacher, who is not at school that day, can open the same documents from home to grade them.

And although the students are working together, the room is near silent.

If sophomores had netbooks, Malyani said, the students would not have had to move to a computer lab to do the activity. She foresees a day in the next few years when the computer labs can be turned back into regular classrooms.