I was in the Indianapolis airport when I saw this on the power outlet on the wall:

Pretty clever I thought. Advertising the electricity on the wall.  And each power outlet was of course, taken by a traveller with a laptop.

Each power outlet in the terminal advertised for a bank or something, and each had some kind of clever saying on them.

What I thought was very interesting, was that EVERY wall power outlet was plugged into, and a variety of devices were being charges, from laptops to iPhones and Blackberry’s. The demand for electricity far exceeded the capacity of the building, and outlets were typically not in convenient places.

What this got me thinking about was how do schools plan to attack the upcoming drive to have one-to-to initiatives if the old buildings don’t have the capacity to recharge the laptops, or don’t have enough outlets to keep the kids plugged in all day? Wil there have to be some type of scheduled charging period? (All 4th period classes have to plug in and recharge to take them through the rest of the day?)

What about laptops that have low battery life? On BizRate, there are only four laptops with battery life rated at 6 hours. Three of them are Apple’s.

Will schools start demanding that the battery life be rated to last through an entire school day?  I think that hte long battery life of any laptop be on a par with the CPU computing power.

Right now at least, it doesn’t look like the battery life is too big of an issue with districts, but I think it should be. No amount of computing power can make up for a dead battery. (Kind of like that old saying that if the bathrooms don’t have toilet paper, it don’t matter how nice the rest of the house is.)

So, you and your laptop can sigh a sigh of relief if you can find electricity.

I can find it now...but I wonder if I will be able to when every kid has a laptop.