Teachers and Laptops

[glennda]

I will add we gave the laptops away to staff - installed XP (as they where licensed for it) on them and the likes of open office etc anything which is freely available.

[Gibson335]

We used to provide laptops to staff on a three year cycle. That was just about right, but obviously a strain on finances. Recent budgetary issues meant that SLT changed this to replacing them only when they were damaged beyond economical repair. Less than two years on and that is starting to catch up on us in several ways. I don't want increasingly older and slower machines on the network, so I'd rather go back to replacing them regularly or putting desktops in classrooms. However, I have to be realistic and accept that finances can't always be found or, indeed, spent wisely. Problem is, people expect a 5 year old laptop to work as well as it did out of the box. Well, 1Gb RAM was fine back then, but not much use now.