School supplies children with laptops

Pongakawa School has bought each of its senior students a laptop to take the pressure off families and remove competition among students.

The school bought 85 14-inch Chromebooks for each of its Year 7 and 8 students to use in the classroom.

TECT gave the school a $35,000 grant to help pay for the laptops and contributed $35,000 with board of trustees reserves and fundraising by the school's parent-teacher association.

Principal Craig Haggo said cost to parents was a big part of why the school decided to get its own devices.

"We started going down the same route that a lot of schools have gone down looking at Bring Your Own Device [BYOD].

"We surveyed the parents and community. They were really enthusiastic. But the underlying worry I had was what people didn't say - being able to afford to buy the device."

Mr Haggo said the more he investigated BYOD, the more he came across pitfalls, including competition over who had the better device, and some parents had a struggle to pay for their children's lunches, let alone adding in the extra cost of a laptop.

"We wanted every child, regardless of economic situation, to have their own device."

Pongakawa School allows parents to buy the devices if they wish so the children can take the laptops home. The devices use Google Documents, which means students on their own laptops can work on a shared project, each making changes to the same document.

"There was a group of kids working on a project. One of the kids was at home because her brother has cancer.

"The other kids in her group were working away, then one of them asked where this girl was. She was working on the project from home and they could all see her making changes and offering comments. That kid hadn't realised she wasn't there. That's a really powerful example of how learning is happening wherever you are."

Year 7 and 8 teacher Jaala Poihipi has adapted to making the most of having a laptop for every child. The students in her maths class, for example, use Sumdog, a programme Mrs Poihipi can tailor to her lessons. She can keep a real-time eye on what the students are doing and find out where they need extra help.

"We also use a programme called Hapara. It's a teacher dashboard where we can monitor and have access to all their emails coming and going. When they are online, we can see what website they are looking at and send them a message if they aren't on track or we can turn a website off. If we want them to view a specific website, we can make it come up on their screen."

Mrs Poihipi said she could see each student's work and send them comments about things to change, which students could do then and there instead of having to wait for books to be marked and returned.

She said the computers were used throughout the day but would not become a replacement for traditional pen and paper.