Use These

I dreamed I was going back to teaching in a "one to one" environment. (I had retired and was going to work for a small Reservation school, teaching part time and IT part time.) I wondered how a school district so poor was going to afford a "one to one" setting.

When I got to my classroom, I found out. There was a pile of Apple GS's sitting in the corner of the room, one for each of my fifteen student desks. I pointed out that getting monitors, keyboards and mice for them would be more expensive than replacing them wholesale, not to mention that they likely didn't have a way to network them to the school's network. The principal seemed quite shocked that there were parts "missing" from them, they had been donated as "working." I had to explain that they might be working, but that didn't mean that they would be useful.

The children arrived. I asked them if they had smart phones, all of them did. I then checked to see if they had HDMI and Bluetooth, they all did. I made the principal a new list. 15 good monitors and 15 Bluetooth keyboard/mouse setups one wireless access point. The students already had their one to one devices I just needed to make them usable in the classroom. The kids were very interested in the pile of Apple computers, so I made them the promise that if they were caught up with their work in class, we would work on making them work again. Oddly, that seemed to excite them. The principal wanted to know how those little things could possible be as good as the big computers he'd found for us. I explained that our students were carrying, in their pockets, more computing power than it took to send us to the moon.

"We never went to the moon!" the principal stated. "Use these." The principal then started directing the students to put one of the huge computers on their little desks. I watched in horror as the principal struggled to figure out how to make the things work. It appears that they didn't come with power cords, either.

I realized I had a long year ahead of me.