June 1st, 2009
An idea for older students using the Classmate
This weekend, I had to set my Classmate aside for a while, putting my experiment temporarily on hold while I put together some large assessments and worked on scheduling. The plan, of course, was to use the Classmate exclusively for a month since it hardly seemed reasonable to be pitching the device for students of all ages if it was inadequate for the majority of my work.
The assessments, however, involved some large graphics, many documents, cutting and pasting, screen captures, etc. While the 4GB of RAM on my MacBook were certainly helpful bouncing around on these tasks, the most serious limitation of the Classmate was screen size. The same held true as I was scheduling our high school; while I have been able to handle quite a bit of the scheduling on our web-bases SIS (X2 Development Corporation’s Aspen Student Information System) on the Classmate (and even found it particularly handy as I carried it between offices and classrooms, working with teachers and administrators to tweak the schedule), the 9″ screen just wasn’t up to a major shift in our schedule I had to engineer this weekend.
2-3 browser windows, notes, and system manuals all needed simultaneous access. Interestingly, I was able to do most of this on my 13″ MacBook, but you’d be surprised how much difference 4″ makes for this sort of high-intensity work.
Obviously, high school scheduling or developing extensive documentation is hardly a typical use case for most students using Classmates. However, older students will clearly be fairly sophisticated in their multitasking and in the kinds of documents (whether presentations, websites, research reports, or other deliverables) they produce. Will the limitations of the Classmate prove too great outside the K-8 set? I don’t think so. It remains my primary computer at this point and I’ve both modified production websites as well as worked on my own development efforts using the little PC (by the way, Screem HTML Editor is an awesome piece of free software for editing web documents).
One really useful addition to deployments for older students, though, would be a few widescreen LCD monitors. Because the Classmate supports a VGA out, a cheap 19″ or 21″ analog LCD would make editing larger documents or sharing large documents with classmates considerably easier. In general, this wouldn’t be necessary; performance certainly isn’t an issue for the average task (or tasks), but sometimes, one simply needs to move things around on a screen.
I’m convinced that the Classmate itself, as well as the hardware and software around which Intel has built an educational ecosystem, are perfectly appropriate tools for students at a variety of ages, as well as most college students in need of a tool to take to class, the library, or home on weekends. Even highly versatile tools can make use of solid accessories; in this case, occasional access to an external monitor overcomes the Classmate’s major shortcoming for older users.
Follow Chris Dawson on Twitter! Christopher Dawson is the technology director for the Athol-Royalston School District in northern Massachusetts and a member of the Internet Press Guild. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations, but always keep in mind that the opinions expressed here are his own and not those of his daytime employer, even if he talks incessantly about his day job.
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