So does Amanda Duvall and Eric Retan, and scores of other College of Education students interning in the Detroit area and in other parts of Michigan.

The students can access information from the Library of Congress and NASA, or take their students to places all over the world through the World Wide Web. And the interns have a way to communicate with their instructors at Michigan State University or other educators worldwide.

Irby and the others are some of the fifth-year interns who have been using laptop computers in their classes. In 1997, the College of Education committed $150,000 to equip over 70 interns in southeast Michigan with a laptops complete with Windows 95 software, Claris Works 5.0, Microsoft Works, and Internet access. A similar project, funded by a Goals 2000 grant, involves 35 trios of MSU interns, collaborating teachers, and field instructors in four other districts in Michigan.

The program is designed to help meet the communication and information needs of the interns and to encourage interns to think more creatively and critically about using technology in teaching.

"The world is becoming more and more technological," Irby says. "I see a great advantage in having the use of the laptops. I am able to quickly get information from the Internet for class lessons, presentations, and papers. I am able to keep an accurate log of my students’ attendance and grades. I’m not sure if I would be as successful as I am during this internship without the laptop."

The computers increased communication between interns and field instructors, participation in the ongoing discussions of a "virtual community" of fellow interns, cooperating teachers, supervising instructors, location of resources on the Internet to aid in curriculum and instructional planning, and doing research.

"We’re trying to make sure the children have current skills and technical skills that they will need for any job opportunity or future educational goals," said Yvonne Mayfield, principal of Bellevue Elementary. "By having the laptop available in the classroom, it becomes a very natural resource for students and they feel very comfortable with it.

"The interns are much further ahead than many people in my generation who started teaching and are just now learning to use a computer. So they will go into a teaching situation where they might have these tools already available to them and they will be quite natural with it."

For Duvall, who also is teaching at Bellevue, the laptop allows her access to resources for her third-grade math and science students that is not available at Bellevue.

Eric Retan, interning at Holt High School, said the laptop provides an access to data either not available or more immediate, than available through the school’s library.

"There’s a Web page with daily updates on the national debt, and archives with data for several years," said Retan. "Students given this data found mathematical functions that might model the data, predicting the future debt if the data followed the same trend."

"I feel that these types of data are more meaningful and real to students. I believe that students are more likely to engage in mathematics if the problems and data that they are using are real and meaningful."

Retan also produces a bi-weekly newsletter, The pre-Calculus Chronicle, for his pre-calculus class, using the laptop.

Carol Campbell, a fourth grade teacher at Bellevue and Irby’s collaborating teacher, said the laptop has helped Irby establish better communication with parents as well as bringing new information and organization to the classroom.

The laptops also give the interns a way to communicate with their professors at Michigan State while at school or when they return home. Before the laptops, communication was much less certain.

"I find that interns ask more questions of me now that they can reach me via e-mail," said Judy Thompson, supervisor of all southeast Michigan-based interns. "The volume of questions is definitely up. Sometimes interns use e-mail to follow up on something they asked in class and sometimes it is the other way around. An intern will e-mail with a question and we’ll make arrangements via e-mail to deal with it during a class break or during lunch."