Mr. Benesh’s Online Community

I bought a laptop a few months ago, and I have been using it in all my classes to take notes. Along with this, however, comes a bonus – games, MSN, email, and other such distractions. This article, http://graphic.pepperdine.edu/perspectives/2007/2007-02-22-staffed.htm, talks about who is really responsible for laptop usage. Should individual teachers ban laptop usage in their classrooms because students are misusing them and not paying attention? Obviously not! Students need to learn how to use these wonderful tools properly instead of forcing teachers to ban them.

This article refers to University classrooms, but soon high school teachers are going to be facing some of the same dilemmas. Personally, I use my laptop mostly in my Chem 210 class. Here is typically what happens: Professor writes a paragraph on the board (while I play Spider Solitaire), then as soon as she is done (mostly), I stop, and take 1/10th of the time to key out what she wrote, and then I follow along (mostly) as she does the example problem. Spider Solitaire is not the biggest problem. The biggest problem is when I go out on a tangent. Often she will say something that will spark my imagination – Chemistry-ally speaking, anyway – and I will go to wikipedia or yahoo and try to find the answer. However, I will often drift back into her lecture five minutes later and have trouble picking up how she got to the point she did. Is this troublesome? YES! What do I do? Jot note what she said to look at it later? I guess I might have to do that.

My main point is that I have read in various articles that “every time you walk by a University class, people on laptops are playing solitaire”. Honestly – I am mature enough right now to know when I can and cannot play solitaire in my class and in my life, okay? This quote from the article is dead on, “Even if the students did not have Internet access or laptops to waste time, they could still pass notes or doodle and draw as they previously did before laptops were commonplace.” Teachers have to evolve and learn how to turn distractions into useful learning opportunities.

Which leads me to my last point. How does this affect me as a teacher? Like I previously mentioned, children having laptops in school is not all that far away. Learning how to deal with them is going to be a big part of everyone’s professional development over the next many years. Whether they are school issued, or come from the home, laptops in high schools are close, and once they are there, instead of seeing articles like this about how laptops might be banned because students are being distracted by them, I want to see (and maybe MAKE!) posts about how great (MY!) students are utilizing these wonderful boxes they have at their disposal. Still, what do you do about the ones who would ignore you whether or not they had a laptop in front of them or not? The ones that play hangman and doodle in class – solitaire is just a click away… That’s my question to anyone reading this. Is it just a matter of engaging? Do we dismantle the games features on the computers? Does this stop them from downloading other games at home? Oh, technology, you are a harsh mistress at times…

Dan