According to a paper “Computer Initiative Technology Grant” produced by Amanda Funk, Dean of Students at the George Washington Elementary School, grant money and private donations will be used to obtain two “multimedia technology exploration carts” that will be available upon completion of construction.

Each will consist of 15 laptops, a wireless hub, a black-and-white printer, 15 headsets 15 mice, 6 iPod Touch devices, an iTunes account and a set of SMART Response Clickers.

The report states “Learning with lap tops gives students the opportunity to construct their own meaning, explore individual paths to knowledge, and provides vast amounts of information at their fingertips.  With laptops and Internet access, students can visit a museum anywhere in the world, perform a virtual dissection, exchange data with students from anywhere in the world, and create multimedia presentation for a world audience.”

It continues: “The iPod touch has a vast amount of potential in the classroom to revolutionize the way students learn and teachers teach.  The applications that are available through iTunes are endless…. Vocabulary applications that students can create and share flashcards, math fact fluency applications, planetarium applications that allow easy exploration of the sky, health and nutrition applications make it easy to look up caloric values in food and create examples of healthy meals, audio books, creating podcasts, recording a sound and automatically composing music…”.

“With SMART Response interactive response systems, teachers gain accurate and immediate insight into student learning while increasing comprehension, retention and engagement.  Without leaving SMART Notebook software, teachers can easily ask questions, instantly see visual results, and continue to explore topics until they are satisfied with the level of their students’ understanding.”

Educators bemoan that students often retrogress during the middle school years. According to the report, a laptop pilot program in Beaufort, South Carolina indicated “that students with laptops demonstrated a ‘sustained level of academic achievement’ during their middle school years, as opposed to students not using laptops who tended to decline during this same period.” Also noted was “academic benefits were most significant in at-risk student populations.”

The “Technology Grant” report concludes “In a world of cell phones, PDA’s, Xbox, Wii, Playstation 3, etc., technology is all around our students.  It is in their everyday life, why shouldn’t it be in schools?”