Laptops for Students

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 separate 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".

Biology

In Biology, we were allowed to use the laptops everyday to take notes. Most people just took notes in Microsoft Word. About half then printed them out for saving in a paper note book, and others amassed a collection of Word files on a flash drive.

Sure, some people played games on their computers or surfed Facebook. I did too in the beginning. (But I did less of it as I learned to control myself, and did even less when I had my tablet)

My Own Tablet with OneNote

I did even less web surfing while the teacher was talking on my tablet. I think their are 3 reasons. First, it's physically harder to do multiple things at once on a tablet. Second, since I owned my tablet after having a CoF laptop in Biology for a few months, perhaps I had learned to discipline myself. But what I think is the most important distinction, is that I could conduct personal business and "surf the web" during my personal time, such as during lunch or in between classes.

It also helped me be more productive in my business too. I could send emails as they came in, instead of waiting for the end of the day to respond. This greatly closed the feedback loop, letting things happen much faster.

OneNote Rocks!

Using OneNote to organize notes is awesome.

Importing docs Takes a while to get used to Easy to add things

Ink. Useful?

After talking with people at Gov School, I am recognizing that ink is more of a gimmick. I am using it less than when I first got my tablet. Writing is just so much slower than typing. Even web surfing feels faster with a mouse. Plus converting screen sizes was so slow with 1GB of RAM, so I avoided it. It's better now with 4GB of RAM, it's just that I am conditioned now not to convert modes.

When I am just taking notes, it is easier to type into OneNote. When I am surfing the internet I do it as a laptop. Perhaps I am just use to that.

However I use ink in 2 cases:

• drawling diagrams
• writing on PowerPoints and notes given by teachers.

It is just so much faster to draw anything. When I do sketches for GridView, I can draw in 30 seconds (and have it digitally stored) what would take me 5 min using draw tools.

In addition, when I get PowerPoints provided by teachers, or typed notes of some form, it is very helpful to be able to draw on top of them. First of all using existing notes lets me skip writing basic information and write more advanced notes. Plus being able to write on top of lets me add stuff without disturbing the original and lets me see where my notes stop and the given ones start.