Steve Moss, who I know from his days as ICT leader in Manchester, apparently was steering schools away from the notion of building ICT suites in schools in his presentation at the Naace conference. Indeed, I know several schools (my wife's included) that are actively considering other uses for the space. This move has been accelerated somewhat by the rapidly growing popularity of the "netbook" style of computer. Much smaller, and more robust than a traditional laptop, they seem to fit the needs of schools extremely well. However, before you chuck out the baby with the bathwater there are some points that need careful consideration.
- How well is your existing ICT suite utilised? Is there a clamour for any available time slot? Or are the doors locked, as they were in the school I visited last week. If it's well utilised, it's worth stopping for a moment and considering why? It's often down to reliability, nothing switches teachers off to the benefits of ICT faster than clunky and unreliable kit, and the converse is equally true. Teachers build trust in a well set up ICT room where the computers are available for log in throughout the school day. Come in, sit down and the lesson starts.
- What are you replacing the ICT suite with? A bank of netbooks or laptops in a lapsafe? Or, a device per child for the whole school? I would suggest that there aren't many schools yet in a position to afford the latter. Assuming it's the former, ask yourself how good are your staff at managing resources? Will they routinely ensure that machines are placed back in the safe and on charge at the end of a session? There is nothing worse than starting a lesson only to find a bunch of machines crashing through lack of power. Is the building designed for the manouevre of a laptop trolley around? Or are there steps? How long do you expect the batteries in the machines to last? After about a year of heavy use laptop/netbook batteries lose a lot of their efficiency and their use time between charges falls off rapidly. Have you budgeted to replace the batteries in the machines?
- What are you expecting children to use these netbooks for? They are simply nothing like as powerful as pcs or higher spec laptops and therefore are not suitable for multimedia work such as video editing. As you might expect, with the name of "netbook" they are good at browsing the web and using basic tools such as word processors, sound recording etc.
- What is the state of your wireless network? Designing a wireless network is a difficult task, if you have a wireless router on top of your lapsafe, don't expect 30 children to watch videos at the same time via a single access point. The crucial issue here is bandwidth. A single wireless router plugged into a 100mbps network point has to share the capacity of that point between every wireless device that is accessing it. Compare that with an ICT suite where each machine has its own 100mbps socket (note: massive oversimplification here as network design also depends heavily on switch configuration, speed of uplinks etc.). It is fair to say, however that a hard-wired network will generally give better performance to the desktop than a wireless one.
What do I conclude from this? Firstly, I don't buy the argument "Let's bring the learning to the kids, rather than the kids to the learning." We don't usually do PE or games in the classroom, and why do we go on trips? A well set up and reliable ICT suite can bring enormous benefits in terms of access and confidence building, whereas an under speced wireless network will do nothing but waste time in failed logins, slow downloads etc. There are many creative applications that are simply not viable using netbooks and an efficient mobile bank of devices requires a lot of careful management.

So, don't make a snap decision to abandon your ICT suite. Talk to staff about their feelings on the issue. Think carefully about what you expect a mobile device network might reasonably achieve and how it will be managed. It may be that a mixed environment might suit you best. Having said all that, we also need to think about technological change. I think we can confidently expect netbooks to get much more efficient in terms of power consumption (and more powerful). I think we can certainly expect them to have much more efficient operating systems - many schools are installing a bloated Windows XP on netbooks to make management of them on existing school networks easier - this results in higher purchase cost, and higher power consumption as the processor will be working flat out. Also, wireless networks will only get faster. My own view, for what it's worth, is that today there is still a role for the ICT suite. In five years time, I may not be so sure - an important consideration if you have a new build coming up.