School children in the south London borough of Lambeth now have rather more than text books and jotters to carry in their schoolbags - there's an £800 laptop computer in there, too. In a unique pilot project, 100 Psion Netbooks have been given to three schools within the Lambeth Action Zone in an effort to make learning more exciting for primary students who have no access to computers at home. The plan is to help develop the literacy and numeracy skills of nine to 10 year-olds - and maybe even breed a new generation of IT-savvy schoolkids.
Tim Coulson, Lambeth education action zone's project director, is at pains to point out that these Netbooks are not meant to substitute pen and paper, or handicap writing skills. But, he says, the machines will help build pupils' sentence construction skills, and homework might actually turn out to be a pleasurable exercise after all.
"We hope they will want to work more than now," he says. "The literacy strategy is to load text and mathematical applications. Two specialist IT people are helping the teachers in these schools with this project." The £60,000 project will be evaluated before Christmas by a team from Warwick University, but already Coulson hopes to gain further sponsorships. Psion's Netbook was picked for the trial not just because of its comparatively low cost and light weight: it's also rugged, able to withstand a drop of 1.5 metres. And Psion is quick to emphasise the machine's simple operating system and "on/off" functionality, which means there's no delay between turning the machine on and being able to use it. The Netbooks are loaded with a whole library of software, including an encyclopedia, English and French dictionaries, Alice in Wonderland and Rudyard Kipling's Jungle Book.
But for the time being, the young and proud owners of the Netbooks are too excited to think of anything beyond their artistic efforts. "I want to do science, maths and English on these," says Tope, busy selecting a new figure for her drawing. Her friend Charlotte adds that they had typed out a story ("I don't remember which"), and found it better than writing. "The first time I was given this computer I was very excited. We can do all things on it," Saffron informs us, earnestly. Their teacher Jo Mclarnon is evidently proud of the way her pupils have adapted to the computer. "They have only had two sessions and are doing so well. I personally do not think that computers will ever replace writing, it is just another tool of learning and can help in so many ways."
