- guardian.co.uk, Tuesday June 11 2002 17.37 BST
"Hands under, please!" It's Wednesday morning in year 5 and only the second time Claire Coulson, the music teacher, has used her school's new laptops with the class.
Seated in pairs - three doesn't work - the children troop up in turn to the recharging trolley at the front of the class and gingerly remove the 15 laptops they'll need to compose a calypso rhythm using 16 pre-recorded phrases.
Minutes later 26 pupils are champing at the bit to put their new "toys" to use, the ComposeWorld program a mere click away. Four are not so lucky. "There's no volume, Mrs Coulson!" Things slow down as she tries to solve the problem. To complicate matters, her own machine won"t log on. The children will have to work without sound.
"Hands under!" warns Mrs Coulson again as stray fingers on touchpads set off a myriad of musical phrases after their owners discover the program carries sound over and above musical instruments.
"No, we don't have gunshots in calypso," she replies to one hopeful request.
Despite the problems, though, most children have worked out a sequence by the end of the lesson and attention levels are high. A certain amount is achieved although it's early days. A well-organised teacher, Coulson is frustrated that technical hitches have prevented her achieving what she wanted from the lesson. But she has no doubts about the laptops.
"Rather than getting 20 instruments out, we can use this program and they can grasp a style like calypso. We did fugues in year six and they were brilliant. They don't have the capability on their instruments to produce something like that, whereas it's all handed to them on the program."
Harvey Road primary school in Croxley Green, Hertfordshire, faces the inevitable teething problems. After several months' deliberating over laptops or a computer suite, it took delivery late last term of 16 RM notebooks loaded with WindowBox software. They are all linked by radio to a central router and to the internet, although they aren't networked.
Visits to other schools were invaluable, says its acting head, Jane Benn, who picked up the idea of a trolley from one. "It takes two children to push it into class." All work is saved in class folders and then saved to a share folder on a central computer.
There are, inevitably, snags. "The main problems arise when something does not work and we can't work out why," said Benn. "We've had printing problems, computers reconfiguring themselves with too many fingers using the touch pad. Now most children use one finger!"
Which is why she values their technician (from Interm IT, Hoddesdon), who visits the school for two hours each Friday. "If you're going to do this, having technical backup is such an integral part."
When the technician first came, people didn't write down which laptop was wrong, and he'd spend all his time switching them on, trying to work out which were faulty. Now all teachers write in a central logbook and the complaints are entered on a spreadsheet, ready for the technician's weekly visit.
Printing has been a headache. All classes send to a printer in the library, which causes problems, particularly for the younger ones who then have to leave their class to pick up their work. "During one project, they'd press print, but there was such a backlog on the printer that it came out 15 minutes later," said one teacher. "It's not instant."
The alternative is printing to classroom printers, which the school is now considering, but that will mean each class having to select the right printer. Little ones take note.
Despite the problems, everyone's agreed having the laptops is brilliant. Gone are nightmares like the time last year when the school had wheeled its PCs into the assembly hall for a session and they all crashed. "It took two weeks to sort them out!" Jane Benn recalls.
The laptops are in use most of the school day, with each teacher using them for one or two hour-long lessons each week. Some teachers have a regular slot, others use them when they wish. All teachers keep ICT diaries of what they've done in class to keep a track of programs covered. "Just looking at those, you can see the amount of use the laptops are getting," said Benn. The reception class uses them in small groups. A keen mum takes them in pairs, one on each side, noting down what they do.
Teachers are often finding new advantages. The laptops have given a great boost to library resources, said year 6 teacher Vicki Murray. She has found websites with extracts of books not present or, at best, in one copy in the library. Now the class can all read about myths and legends at the same time. Another plus is in monitoring pupils' abilities. Assessing IT skills is much easier when a whole class is working together rather than children going to the class PC, searching for something then returning when something has gone wrong.
But using laptops means teachers have to be on top of their chosen programs. There are no shortcuts in the familiarisation process, said Benn. "They usually take them home to work on as it can take several hours to go through a program and find out all the problems children may encounter. It works out at about an hour at home a week."
And beware hidden costs. CD-roms could be loaded on Harvey Road's shared folder but it would mean paying out for a costly 16 site licences. Instead it's opted to use CDs individually. It's due to receive CDs that come free with the laptops and has ordered some multiple copies of certain popular programs.
To go the laptop route takes organisation and a clear strategy. Training has been based around an inset day for all staff and classroom assistants, involving an introduction, going through the basic operations and viewing different programs. "I plan to get everyone familiarised with the laptops by the end of term," said Benn. By then she also hopes classes will have begun to create web pages.
The head's verdict so far? "You just know that when you're going to use the laptops, the children are so enthusiastic."
