Difference between revisions of "Laptops for Students"

Revision as of 21:24, 7 August 2008

During the second semester of 11th Grade Haverford High School participated in a PA state program called Classrooms of the Future. It was a program to get one laptop per student int HS classrooms. In addition, for the last month of school I carried my own Fujitsu T4220 tablet PC around. In addition, I used this laptop to take notes at Gov School. At Gov School, each student was issued their own laptop with full (unrestricted) access. This article is about my experiences with them and note taking.

Classrooms of the Future

The problem with the laptops is that they were per classroom. Since CoF was in 3 out of my 4 classes, I had a seperate laptop in each. Each class took ~5 min to get and put away the laptops. In most classes, we did not use them at all. In every class except Biology, we only used the laptops for a certain task, say a web quest. A web quest consisted of a very boring task of going site to site, as written on the worksheet, in order to fill it out. It was totally boring. Teachers did not even really like giving those because of the large overhead of getting out the laptops. Many just gave this project because they had to "use the technology".