New South Wales to provide 197,000 students with netbooks
Small notebook computers are no question perfect for students to use at school. The small and light form makes it easy to backpack around the school and as long as the notebook has fairly standard components it is more than sufficient to meet the needs of those students. The officials in the Australian state New South Wales agrees with that assessment and have announced that 197,000 public school students will get what sounds like netbooks this year.
"These custom-made laptops are about three-quarters the size of aregular laptop - compact enough to fit into a schoolbag or a locker butpowerful enough to support all the IT needs of our high school students.
"Wecan deliver the digital revolution by putting wireless networks inevery public secondary school and buying a laptop for all the 197,000students in years 9 to 12."
They go on to indicate that students will get to keep the "small notebooks" when they leave school. This is a very ambitious program and the largest of this type we’ve heard of so far. Kudos to the Aussies for putting their money where their students are. There was no word given which company is supplying the laptops.
Finally- it’s only taken a year for Kevin Rudd to actually *do* something that’s not travelling the world!
Hoping that this is rolled out to the other states shortly after New South Wales gets theirs.
Posted by: Beau | November 30, 2008 at 3:06 pm
Update:
http://www.smh.com.au/news/national/laptops-in-schools-will-be-antisocial/2008/11/30/1227979845018.html
The cost per unit is A$2245.00 and Myspace and Facebook will be blocked from use.
and Beau.. you really don’t like poor old Kevin Rudd do you. I would hae thought that getting this going after ony 1 year in office was exceptional progress for a politician.
Gordon
Posted by: Gordon Cahill | November 30, 2008 at 3:23 pm
I saw this on the news last night. The unit they were demonstrating on the news was a Lenovo.
Posted by: gary | November 30, 2008 at 3:49 pm
That quoted unit cost includes software, wireless network and teacher training.
Posted by: James Kendrick | November 30, 2008 at 4:53 pm
My brother is in year 11 and I thought this had already happened?…
His school got a grant or something such from the government to buy laptops for students in these years already.
Posted by: mr-crash | November 30, 2008 at 9:57 pm
You know, when I was a kid we were allowed to bring our own calculators to school but we weren’t allowed to use them during exams. I wonder if that’s why I never win the lottery?
Posted by: John in Norway | December 1, 2008 at 9:16 am
The criteria for the tender opens tomorrow.
It will be interesting to see if NSW go with an open source OS and apps. Afterall, even if M$ drastically reduce their license fee to around $20 to capture tomorrow’s ‘market’, it will still add almost $4 million to the cost of providing these netbooks to the students. As NSW are almost broke, it may be considered an unnecessary expenditure.
Posted by: Daj | December 2, 2008 at 4:06 am