Word: packer
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None of the students at the Packer Collegiate Institute in Brooklyn, N.Y., will have the same sort of memory. For them, computers have always been there, a fact of life, in a way that no generation before theirs has experienced. Packer is at the cutting edge of an educational movement in the U.S. that is integrating laptop computers into middle schools and high schools--they're known as "laptop schools." But Packer has taken the idea a step farther. Its entire campus has been turned into a wireless Internet-access zone. Wherever they go, whatever they're doing--whatever they...
...school of the future, the Packer Collegiate Institute has a pretty fancy past. It was founded in 1845 (it's the oldest independent school in Brooklyn) and it occupies a cluster of architecturally distinguished buildings in downtown Brooklyn, including a 19th century church complete with vaulted ceilings and stained-glass windows. Packer has an impressive pedigree, a highly competitive admissions policy and an extremely hefty tuition bill, and in 1999 the school's administrators took a look at their computer lab and deemed it unworthy of the Packer name. The staff decided that to keep pace with the galloping ubiquity...
...Would the kids use the technology to cheat? Would they become cyborg Stepford children? Would they, Brooklyn being Brooklyn, get mugged for their laptops after class? "I was worried about how it was going to affect their focus in the classroom," remembers Rebecca Boucher, who has four kids at Packer. "Their interaction, their basic eye-to-eye contact, even. Was it going to become an isolating experience? I was very unclear how it was going to work." The teachers were the ones who would have to answer that question, and they didn't know either. "How would I do this...
...wireless Packer would be very different from the old Packer. All assignments, handouts, work sheets, what-have-you would be distributed electronically. (Thus rendering the copy machine, possibly the only device on earth less reliable than the computer, obsolete.) Students would take notes on their laptops in class, then take their laptops home and do their homework on them. To turn in an assignment, they would simply drag and drop it into the appropriate folder, where the teacher could wirelessly retrieve it. Voila: the paperless classroom...
...fall of 2001, the system was ready to go live. Christina Devitt, Packer's cheerful, indefatigable director of technology, and her team placed 50 wireless transceivers around the school--unassuming, almost unnoticeable little boxes that flooded the campus with wireless signals. Two grades, sixth and ninth, were selected to be the school's inaugural cybernauts. Their parents were required to buy laptops for them on their own dime: Apple iBooks for the sixth-graders, Dell Windows machines for the older kids--the idea was to give students a look at both sides of the personal computing world. To kick things...