NOTES OF 3/6/02

                     LAPTOP SUPPORT GROUP MEETING

                           George Markowsky

As before, I am circulating notes based on the 3/6/02 meeting of the
Laptop Support Group (LSG). This is not a set of minutes, but rather a
summary of important announcements and decisions. After many delays we
finally met to discuss the status of the laptop proposal. A special
guest at the meeting was Bette Manchester who reported on various
happenings, and filled us in on attacks in the Legislature on the
Laptop Initiative.

The first installment of training for teachers from the Pilot Schools
will occur on 3/11/02 and 3/12/02. It is primarily slated to be
Technical Training. Apple proposed that training follow the following
schedule:

Day 1 Taking care of iBook computers
Day 2 Project Seed

There are some efforts to reverse the order of the days and to modify
the content. In particular, it is hoped that Day 1 might cover
Teaching & Learning and that the focus should not be on the computer,
even though Day 2 might be an Apple hardware day.

It is expected that 40-50 teachers will meet here in Orono at UM, and
that this will be a prototype for a second meeting later in the week
and for the training that all teachers will receive. It expected that
staff from Project Seed will run groups of 100 people with 3 or 4
instructors.

The Pilot Schools are now called Exploration Schools.

We discussed various ways that we might be helpful in the project. One
idea was to set up some sessions to help the Tech coordinators with
iBooks and support. We also asked if it would be possible to have
members of our group meet some of the teachers informally sometime on
Monday and the request is under consideration. I have not heard
anything so far, so there will be a short notification window if the
request is granted.

People asked if they could sit in on the training, but this was deemed
not possible because of the very limited seating capacity and overflow
crowd already expected.

Things are moving, and how we can help is not clear at this time.
Future meetings of our group will be scheduled as seems appropriate.