Re:Long ways to go (Score 1)

"Going backwards" may be helpful. I teach in a private school. After three years of "exclusive lap top use," I saw classroom performance change significantly. In these past three years, I gave my first "F's." (I've taught for 23 years.) Next year, I am prohibiting lap-tops in my class room. I want my students to engage with me and each other and the material they are working with . . . not with their laptops. *The amount of paper wasted is tremendous because most teachers still want a paper copy to get away from their laptops. *The "reviewing" (correcting) capabilities in MS Word are much more time consuming than putting proofreading marks by hand on a paper. (The advantage to electronic grading is you have an electronic copy to refer to when writing quarter comments to parents.) *Textbooks are still lugged around because textbooks are not available in electronic format yet. So now we have kids with textbooks AND laptops, carrying two backpacks. Sometimes the backpacks weigh 50 lbs! (I see a problem with that!) *Assignments turned in electronically have problems with "whiz kids" using open source documents that won't open in MS Word; with e-mail systems; assignments going to junk e-mail; attachments being stripped from e-mails; lines going down; or the "moodle" system being screwed up the evening the kids are to submit their homework. *Tests are automatically scored IF you use "multiple guess." (Even short answers have problems in the electronic world.) Multiple guess is not the best assessment tool. *Students are googling or gaming when they need to be listening or working on their assignments. (Ah, yes, that little "not on task" smile on their faces gives them away.) *Students do not take helpful notes because they are trying to "take dictation" of the lecture. I see a definite problem with kids struggling to put concepts into their own words. *Google and Wikipedia are not credible sources for most areas of study. I put together an entire lecture from Wikipedia (for demonstration purposes) in which most of the information was WRONG. I gave the lecture and at the end told the kids that the information was all wrong. Boy, were the kids angry with me. I said, "Now you know how I feel when I read your papers." They then had to find the mistakes and correct them (Which also did not go over well. Ah, the challenges of having to work while learning!) *Most classrooms are not equipped for safe "plug-in." I have Power strips hanging out of the walls and then I have to carefully walk between all the power cords plugged into the power strip. It feels like Indiana Jones and the Electric Web. NOBODY MOVE or you may break your neck! As a high school teacher, I can see a lot of benefits to having students with laptops. You could save a LOT of paper (it's amazing how much paper and toner is used on making handouts in our school every day), textbooks wouldn't have to be lugged around, assignments could be turned in electronically (no more "the teacher lost my assignment"), tests could be automatically corrected and students would have instant feedback., along with a lot of other benefits.