Video:  Private Tuscaloosa School Trades Textbooks For Laptops

By Linda White
Reporter
Published: August 29, 2008

Central Alabama is home to one of the nation’s top technology schools.  Students at Tuscaloosa Academy in Tuscaloosa are required to use Tablet PC’s instead of textbooks.

Teacher said, “Get to a place, you can save it as a word document.“

Take a look inside this Tuscaloosa Academy classroom, no textbooks, no pens and pencils, very little paper.

From smart boards to laptops,

Teacher said, “Subject tells who or what the sentence is about.“

These students are getting ready for the future and so are their teachers.

English Teacher, Cita Smith, said, “I’ll sit down and create, just the way I type a worksheet, now I type a smart board exercise.“

The Tablet PC’s are bought by parents at a cost of 15-hundred dollars.  Not only can students surf the web, read textbooks, but they can also take notes in their own hand-writing.  Students receive their laptops through the school, preloaded with software to keep them from going to websites they shouldn’t visit.

Even at this age, these 7th graders know how this technology will help make learning easier, in the classroom and beyond.

Seventh Grader, Joshua Jones said, “The laptops, when you connect to the internet, there’s global.  I think now, we’re becoming a global society so everyone will need like a computer.“

There are some negatives.  Laptops do break down and have to be sent out for repairs.  The building wide wi-fi doesn’t work in every corner and occasionally a laptop is left at home.

Smith said, “These are not new problems for teachers, they’re just a new way of having some of the same problems.  I’ll say there’s many more positives than negatives.“

Tuscaloosa academy is a private school, with 300 students in grades k through 12.  Tuition ranges from six to eight thousand dollars a year.