Do PGCE students at your school get laptops?

[maniac]

As title - if you have any PGCE students at your school, do they get issued with their own laptop for the duration they are at the school?

And as an extension to this, does anyone know if universities would actually expect them to be issued with their own laptop while they're on a placement at the school?

Thanks,

Mike.

[pete]

As title - if you have any PGCE students at your school, do they get issued with their own laptop for the duration they are at the school?

And as an extension to this, does anyone know if universities would actually expect them to be issued with their own laptop while they're on a placement at the school?

Thanks,

Mike.

Unless their department is willing to buy them a laptop out of their budget (it's happened), they usually get whatever we can scrape up from the bottom of the "probably works, but it'll be slow" cupboard.

The flipside is that the recycled laptops have been recycled for a reason - they're not suitable for everyday teaching use due to being worn out or being subtly broken (mashed usb ports / nic that doesn't retain the network cable). It's not really fair on the student, but we don't have the cash (or I don't see any PGCE-associated cash) to provide laptops to PGCE students.

[TechSupp]

Simple answer is as far as I know or experienced...No! GTP's yes as they are attached to the school for most of the year but PGCE are only short term, just like having any other teaching student on placement, we would not issue them with one, so PGCE are no different.

[stevehill06]

Both schools that I've worked in didn't give the PGCE students Laptops.

[powdarrmonkey]

No, we don't (and we could afford to, we just don't).

[DaveP]

The school has an undertaking to give a laptop to each member of staff is over a certain percentage of full time: eg: If a member of staff works 2.5 days [0.5] they would not be entitled to a laptop.

[AngryTechnician]

We don't take PGCE students at my current school, but at my last school we had two loan laptops put aside for them. However, we never actually used them because the students always had their own laptops which we hooked up to our guest network, and I believe in the most recent financial year the school has not replaced them for financial reasons.

[Linfit]

We give latops to GTP students as they are members of staff. We do not give laptops to PGCE students as it would be expensive (we would need a pool of around 25 machines) and in practice most of them seem to have laptops anyway.

The only plus side would be that if they used our laptops we would have control over the anti-virus and security on the machines they were using; the vast majority of the viruses that Sophos reports coming into school are doing so on PGCE students memory sticks.

[K.C.Leblanc]

We do if they want them. We have 4 laptops set aside just for this job. 2 of them are quite decent, 1's ok and 1's awful. However in practice it's unusual for all 4 to be taken up.

[p858snake]

Instead of giving them laptops or such since most already have them, how about a terminal server type setup so they can just remote into the system?

[rad]

They are not employees of the school, they are more like volenteers ( i no there is more to it) but we don't either. GTP's yes but personally why cant staff buy their own laptops now they are cheap and i dont mind loading Office or Smartboard on it for them.

[ful56_uk]

all of our gtp and pgce get laptops as the school wants them to feel they are valued members of staff and are no different to any other teacher. To be fair to those gtp and pgce students they use there laptops more than some of our full time members so win win really.

[Edu-IT]

No. They usually have their own anyway.

[steve]

No, we have large numbers of PCSE students - 16 at present (over 40 per year) so its just too expensive and onerous to support that number of laptops.

We did have a request recently to issue them all with one by a department but this was turned down - we are looking at offering free wifi and a pre-loaded USB drive for them.

Some universities do loan them to students I found out the other week.

We do loan them to GTPs assigned to our school for their major placement (only 3 of these this year)

[sparkeh]

No to PGCEs or GTPs, just can't afford it and there are staff in the queue for new ones anyway.
If we got to a position where regular staff all had adequate laptops then we might consider GTPs but I don't think we would ever give to PGCEs.