When Should You Buy Your Kid A Laptop? 856
GuitarNeophyte writes "Marketwatch News reports that some people say that we should be buying our kids laptop computers well before they get into the higher education realm. Even as early as middle school. From the article: 'These days, it's almost unquestioned that college-bound students will tote laptops back to school. For parents of high school and middle school kids, the decision to invest in a laptop is far from given.'"
Worked for me (Score:5, Informative)
Used Laptops (Score:5, Informative)
Of course, all you bargain hunters will now swoop in and grab them... where's that "back" button?
Answer: In Cobb County, they won't have to! (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/wlg/7416 [oreillynet.com]
So don't worry about it! Move to Georgia, specifically Cobb County. Sure, we'll force your kids to listen to Creationism being equated to Natural Selection, but they'll be hearing it from an mp3 on their very own iBooks!
Re:Used Laptops (Score:4, Informative)
I just bought a ThinkPad A30P from these guys with a 15" 1600x1200 UXGA screen for under $500 and its the best computer purchase I've made this year.
Re:Worked for me (Score:5, Informative)
1. There are not many diagrams, drawings, formulas or charts put on the board. While I can type much faster than I can write, I cannot use computer drawing tools as easily as I can draw by hand.
2. You need to shuffle a lot of papers. In Law School, you read thousands of court cases. While these are generally edited and aggregated into casebooks, professors often supplement the casebooks with additional cases, articles, &c. Because all the cases are available electronically, I have found it much easier to download them in PDF and use Adobe Acrobat to write them up virtually.
3. You need to search. Face it, pouring through 100 pages of hand-written notes for something does not work well in class. Computers excel at this.
4. You're disciplined. There are a million times more distractions on a computer than there ever were on paper. When I was an undergrad (86-90), there were a few people who read the newspaper in the back of class, but that was about it. Now, then can be playing poker, IM'ing each other, reading the news, writing e-mails, etc.... If you're not disciplined enough to keep your use of these things down, then the laptop may be a problem.
5. Lousy handwriting. Not being about to read your own handwriting makes reviewing hand-written very difficult. The only way that's going to be bad on a laptop is if you're a horrible typist or you use a bad font.
Re:Hmm.. (Score:3, Informative)
Such systems already exist. There is Edubuntu [edubuntu.org] and also some Live CD's based on Knoppix [knoppix.net] with focus on education. I'm sure others exist, but those just a few.
Clamshell iBook...closest thing to kid-proof (Score:5, Informative)
Voila: http://wegenermedia.com/ibk300bby.htm [wegenermedia.com]
These are clamshell iBooks, which are basically designed for K-12 kids. They are made with that Fischer-Price ABS plastic for a reason: durability. Wegener Media refurbs iBooks. They are a bear to upgrade, so have Wegener stuff the iBook with all the RAM you can (512MB SO-DIMM, bringing the onboard RAM up to 544MB) and a nice fat hard drive. When I got mine upgraded by them, I got a Fujitsu 30GB drive.
These won't run Tiger without something like X Post Facto to convince Tiger to install, so stick with Panther. Current patch level is 10.3.9. MS Office 2003 will not install on an 800x600 resolution, so look for Office v.X Student-Teacher which is very happy running on a Clamshell.
This is not a good gaming lappie under X. ATI Rage Acceleration, which allowed these machines to play games like Unreal Tournament (1999) and Quake III Arena under Mac OS 9.x, was not carried over to X. There was a whole class-action lawsuit over this, and if you have an old-school iBook or a Beige G3 or a Wallstreet PowerBook you can get the cost of X refunded if you turn your disks in. However, in some cases, this inability to do 3D Acceleration might actually be a good thing.
You should be able to get away with a fully loaded Clamshell iBook for about $500. Yeah, you can also get a new Dell Inspiron lappie for a little more. But that Dell will be toast after a few weeks of being toted around in a kid's backpack. They are flimsy even for adults. Give one to a kid and it's dead meat.
Re:Worked for me (Score:3, Informative)
No, what promotes social promotion is homework based grades and a lack of testing. If social promotion bothers you then bitch at your teacher to base grades off of tests and grade on a curve.
Then if these people on laptops really are just fucking around they'll fail the class and make things a bit easier for everyone else due to the curve, but if they are like me they'll pass the tests and not have to do the piles of homework designed for those that learn slowly.
Either way, grades will become a measure of whether you understand the material rather than whether you can afford to pay someone who understand the material to do your homework for you.
Re:Worked for me (Score:1, Informative)
If all you're doing is a lecture dump via keyboard, then you may want to consider a Palm + Keyboard. Then you're looking at 10-15hrs between charges, and you can upload directly to your PC/laptop later. I know the included memo editor was small a few years ago, but there are other editor options (even free) that could suffice.
Re:When? Never. (Score:3, Informative)
http://www.resurgence.org/resurgence/issues/quinc