Rollout a Whopping Success!

On August 22 through the 24th, 2005, the Daviess County Public School, IBM and Lenovo staff distributed 900 laptops to high school freshmen.  The image for the laptops had been placed on the computers by Lenovo prior to shipping them from China. Laptops were handed out to students in their scheduled classes. The students unboxed their computers, installed their batteries and turned them on. The machines attached themselves to the wireless network that pushed down Windows and McAffee updates.  Then students logged into the Daviess domain and their school's Novell network. THERE WAS NOT A SINGLE COMPUTER THAT DID NOT FUNCTION PROPERLY.

A movie that was produced by IBM was shown that demonstrated proper care of the laptop and students were instructed about the ports and special keys such as the volume control, brightness and the function key that suspends the hard drive.   Classroom teachers in every subject area have divided the responsibility to instruct the students over the next few days on:

• laptop do's and don'ts, conserving battery life
• using student e-mail
• retrieving teacher assignments and saving files over the Novell network
• use of the Moodle on-line course server
• availability and use of the subscription web resources that include Nettrekker, Atomic Learning, Turnitin, Curriculum Pathways, eGuidance Center, Ky Virtual Library and United Streaming
• Internet safety, copyright laws and ethics
• how to install textbooks to their computer
• subject specific software such as Geometer's SketchPad

Our teachers have begun to use the laptops in creative ways and our students are learning 24/7!  The project is off to an exciting start.