We have four "COW"s -- computers on wheels -- available for teacher check out in our library. Each wheeled cart has 18 Dell laptops with a wireless router so that students can sit at their classroom desks and work on a laptop. This all sounds great in concept, but the reality is that, at any given time, anywhere from two to eight of the laptops on each cart may not be functional for a variety of reasons. From the teacher side, I have experienced the frustration of taking 20 minutes of a 50 minute class to get all students up and running on a functional computer. Not fun!
My job this afternoon was to go through two of the four carts we have and do a type of inventory: which laptops connected to the network and which did not; how many connected to the internet and how many did not. This was a tedious process, to say the least, but deparately needed to be done. Teachers are usually so harried in their class time that laptops simply get shoved back on the cart and the next user has no idea which ones work and which don't. I marked each bum computer with a post it so that, for the time being, teachers knew to not even bother handing that one out. Then I notified our "tech duty" staff members that work orders were ready to be submitted to the help desk.
Our laptops are on a lease and the computers get updated/replaced next year, but right now I know of many teachers who don't even bother using laptops because they are so unreliable. Hopefully, this reality will improve next year.
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