Laptops in the classroom

I enjoyed this article but I keep thinking to myself that this article was written seven years ago and when we are talking about technology in almost any fashion, seven years is a very long time. One of my biggest questions is the implementation of student laptops. If they get to take them home and bring them to school, what type of security settings do you put on there? I would think you would need an excellent IT department that knew what they were doing so that kids don’t figure out ways around security features. I also wonder about power cords and the number of outlets required to charge the student’s laptops such as in Julia’s example.
One of my favorite ideas behind the Woodvale situation is the idea of how much communication goes on between teachers, parents and students over email. I have wondered for several years why we send so much paper home with the kids when we should have email addresses for everyone and send out a mass email with the papers attached.
Being in a computer lab every day my students always have a laptop in front of them at all times. That being said it is hard to compare my class to a regular education classroom that would always have computers in front of them. One of the first drawbacks of computers always being in front of the students is the students want to play with the mouse and on the desktop. Unless you have them close the screen down it is very hard to keep their attention. I also teach my keyboarding classes in a different computer lab that have desktop computers with full size keyboards which are hooked up to 17 inch lcd monitors. In this other lab you cannot have the student close down a screen and the students can almost hide behind the monitors because in 5th grade the students just are not that tall. They constantly play with the mouse and with the icons on the desktop just because it is in front of them. Based on my scenario I would prefer the laptops over the desktop computers.