Laptops For Students Not a Good Idea?

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Rich Tate

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We’ve seen many articles over the past year or so about the increasing technology that is being given to our students as tools. Unfortunately, maybe we will now see a step back from that approach as one school found out that the laptops were simply causing more trouble and the administration believes they weren’t making a difference.

Even more telling is that the laptops aren’t actually helping the students at all. "After seven years, there was literally no evidence it had any impact on student achievement -- none," said Liverpool school board president Mark Lawson. "The teachers were telling us when there’s a one-to-one relationship between the student and the laptop, the box gets in the way. It’s a distraction to the educational process."
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yah, no one saw this coming *roll*...

Are these the same people who believe K through 6 need access to computers too?
 
i think i would do better in classes without my laptop. I play poker and chat during almost all my classes (I don't get wireless access in 2 of them, but next semester we are supposed to have campus wide wireless).

5 out of my 6 classes are comp sci classes that are held in computer labs, and we can use the computers during class, but I prefer my laptop since it has all my settings and programs on it.
 
Yea I don't know how kids make it through class without computers, lol. I am 27 and I made it through college fine with just a desktop computer, all the kids that texted on their phones and brought their laptops routinely got lower grades. Its a big distraction to the learning process I think. My favorite was when kids would goof off in computer classes, because the teacher could see what every student was doing on the computers in the computer lab.
 
a specific laptop (thinkpad a21e)was required for my computer science program at the college i attended in ottawa. dull lectures were much more tolerable while my pc was powered on and connected to the campus-wide 802.11b network.

the laptop definitely saw more CS than course curriculum and the handy integrated voip network, which was installed in the brand new residence i lived in during my freshman year, was great for team-speak too.

:D

thanks nortel!
 
lol.. I love my laptop in class, but it sure is a huge distraction.

I recently had Physics at U of Mich this past semester, and I brought my own WRT54GS router with DD-WRT on it so I could get full speed wireless for my friends and I. 15mbits down and 6mbits up is fast. :D We would sit in class and file share, play WoW, CS, forum browse, etc. :p I guess the only reason we would actually come to class was to get points from reading quizzes and lecture activities. We would average less than 50% on tests, and we got around 70/200 on the final exam. The curve was awesome though because the class was so impossible. I ended up with a C. :D
 
Generally speaking, laptops in class are distractions. However, when the student actually cares to learn the material, the laptop can be a wonderful resource to have. I think it is important to understand that laptops are not totally useless in the classroom environment.

From my experience, more students would take the "distraction experience" over the "learning experience". Who is at fault with that?
 
simpsond said:
Generally speaking, laptops in class are distractions. However, when the student actually cares to learn the material, the laptop can be a wonderful resource to have. I think it is important to understand that laptops are not totally useless in the classroom environment.

From my experience, more students would take the "distraction experience" over the "learning experience". Who is at fault with that?
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Uhm... lemme guess! It's the schools fault.. right? :) This is just the new generation of the effects of bad upbringing. Of course the STUPID kids will play video games instead of actually trying to learn.

I'm older than your average college freshman (about double) and recently took a course on illustrator. I have -0- formal training in illustrator, yet, somehow, I aced that class. Midterm I had 160 out of 140 possible points :) (Extra credit). Kids around me who were MUCH more talented than I am, artisitically, were having problems passing.
Was it because they couldn't figure out the pen tool?
Or was it because half the fucking computers were on myspace.com everytime I came into class?
 
w1retap said:
lol.. I love my laptop in class, but it sure is a huge distraction.

I recently had Physics at U of Mich this past semester, and I brought my own WRT54GS router with DD-WRT on it so I could get full speed wireless for my friends and I. 15mbits down and 6mbits up is fast. :D We would sit in class and file share, play WoW, CS, forum browse, etc. :p I guess the only reason we would actually come to class was to get points from reading quizzes and lecture activities. We would average less than 50% on tests, and we got around 70/200 on the final exam. The curve was awesome though because the class was so impossible. I ended up with a C. :D
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Congratulations. a C means you are mediocre at best. Don't pat yourself too hard on the back there, w1retap. Way to reach for the stars....

I personally would have failed you. I also wouldn't have allowed you to bring in your own router :).
 
^^I have to agree the technology isn't the fault, it is the user.

That's the big part of this that sucks. The people who would potentially use the tool and benefit well from it will lose out.
 
No, you simply don't understand how hard the class was, and how shitty the professor was. ;)
 
I'm telling.. government officials are FUCKING MORONS!!!

it's because they were all liberal arts majors...

going through school with computers.. i remember telling people, and even today.. how computers in the class room is just a HUGE waste of money.. they spend all this money on computers and software (SOFTWARE THAT NO ON USES)


I'm serious.. non-technical people are all "ZOMG COMPUTERS ARE THE FUTURE" we need computers in every class room cause it sounds liek a good idea..

i'm glad these idiots are catching on...

people = teh stupic
 
I admin k-12 schools. My tech coordinator took what I said to beart and I am pleased to say we will not be buying ANY more laptop carts. Wireless is for cofee shops...not secure environments. My reasons are as follows:

1. Laptops are a bad investment: you are often buying last years tech they managed to shrink and stuff in a laptop. And you pay a sort of premium for it.

2. Lappy's while convenient are fragile. Especially for kids who frequently abuse them

3. Wireless signals are unreliable. You are sharing often a signal bandwidth less then a one to one wired connection among 20 or so students. Occasionally, a signal will drop and non technical staff or students put a halt to lessons trying to get little blips to work.

4. with 1-3 also comes cost of maintenance. A laptop cart, depsite the best configs possible will put a strain on budget and staff that is not cost effective. If the school district is going to limit staff, like in my case, there is not enough time in a day to deal with laptop specific and wireless specific issues and maintain security.

500 workstations and 5 servers, plus switches adding new deployments, projects and planning upgrades is too much to ask for someone not making a ton of money. I don't. I maintain a high level of uptime with limited security issues and a well designed infrastructure that is easy for me to maintain alone. It should be me who has a ton of input to what it is I can handle and what I see as problem areas.

Often, a school's tech coordinator or superintendent makes decisions on what is shiny for political purposes without much logic going into the decisions. I am lucky that I haven't had that issue yet at this new district. And can only pray my guidance will continue to be taken seriously. We dodged a few bullets already from shady salesmen on expensive worthless hardware. But I suppose at some point someone will fuck up and look to technology for a distraction to save their own ass. That never works though, anbd when that time comes I will leave.
 
I don't see the point of it... In the classes where they had computers in front of us during the lectures, I'd just nod off and start web surfing. I would have played WoW in class if I had my own laptop. I saw others dick around on their MySpace page or email accounts.

It was interesting that our professor seemed to accept it. He believed students our age was more capable of multitasking. Might have been true - there wasn't a curve for that particular class.
 
w1retap said:
No, you simply don't understand how hard the class was, and how shitty the professor was. ;)
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No.. no, I get it.. the difference between me, and you, when I have a class with a bad professor, that's a tough class, is, I try harder. I make an effort to make sure I understand everything. Study more. Go to the professor, even if he sucks, and tell him you are struggling.

Or..
You could play WoW
 
Wait, K-12 students are actually supposed to use laptops for productivity?! I always thought the only reason that kids had access to computers was for MySpace...:rolleyes:
 
Lower grades shouldn't need laptops. Highschool, maybe. But college, it's heaven when you get to type your notes instead of having to write them down.
 
CyberDeus-RagDoll said:
No.. no, I get it.. the difference between me, and you, when I have a class with a bad professor, that's a tough class, is, I try harder. I make an effort to make sure I understand everything. Study more. Go to the professor, even if he sucks, and tell him you are struggling.

Or..
You could play WoW
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I studied very hard outside of lecture. When lecture came around, it was a joke. The professor read off of her note cards and did problems incorrectly and erased it at least 12 times before she did it right for us to 'learn' how to do it properly. I scored the class average or better on all my exams. :)
 
I long ago outlawed the use of computers and calculators in my science and engineering classes. The not-so-wise students seem to think the things are a substitute for their brains and the answer is in there! Computers have a bad characteristic, they do what we tell 'em to do --- not what we thought we asked them to do. Wanta play games? Feel free to do it elsewhere.

[FONT=&quot]I do fully support the study and use of computers in classes aimed at those areas and yes from a young age. In today's world it is a significant advantage for people to be fluent in their use. And yes, I’ve played a game to two too and will continue to do so.[/FONT]
 
this is all BS, maybe laptops are not a good idea for middle and upper class kids that may already have pcs in their homes.

my milwaukee urban students, less then a 1/3rd have pcs and less then half of those have internet access.

our school district MPS does not even allow students to take books home, because they do not trust them (which to me seems racists, because white suburb students get to take books home and lose them)... so my 120 students share 30 books... they receive a lower quality education for many reasons.

1. they do not have pcs/internet, how can they modernize outside of school?
2. they cannot take books home, all reading must be done in class or use of photocopies if your school does not have a copy room bitch. mine luckly is a sweetheart.
3. MPS has schools with broken chalk boards, out of date copiers, limits of 1000 sheets per teacher, for 120 students a semester (not my school, but the last one i was in did!)...
4. students cannot afford notebooks, folders, school supplies

laptops would allow them to read files electronically, have a pc in their home, and a place to take notes. they could also learn office /word skills while studying a topic like social studies. it also would allow me to use books that are not bias, or against minority viewpoints. instead, we have to rely heavily on other resources.

these articles are all crap, what happens in british schools isnt what happens in all other schools. plus with a laptop, my stoner students could pawn it for cash, pretty handy.
 
also if you are a teacher that lets students use laptops on tests, then you are retarded.
 
Laptops for student are just fine. Just so long as my tax dollars are not buying them for the student.
 
each student receives between 4k-15k depending on their location to their district.

in wisconsin suburbs the amount of funding each student receives is about 8k-14k...

however Milwaukee public schools each student only receives 6500$.... compared to their suburban counterparts.

what does the school do with that money? well they could buy laptops, more teachers, paper, copy machines etc... its how they use their budgets.

most school districts i would say do a bad job due to bureaucracy, since they get involved in large contracts... that they must purchase all products through... so 100$ chair becomes 400$ because they saved 20k on computers... and then they end up saving negative money, losing money through contracts.

anyways... some schools copy machines charge schools 1 cent per copy... they make probably 100$ copies a day.... 30kish? who knows... plus costs of machines (20k a year, because they rotate/buy new ones)... our school is buying 100 printers too... thats like 10k...

so why not buy a few laptops?

instead of having laptops maybe we should get desks that were made after 1965, when my parents graduate in 1978... that can hold a computer at their seat? that might be more cost effective... since students would switch seats, not have to worry about theft or damage, or about lost goods.

maybe we should build in school pcs... instead we have old p4's that have limited software usage and security that makes them worthless except for msword.

i can keep ranting but its useless
 
I think that laptops for college are great.

For high school, they can be pretty handy too. But in that scenario, the administrators would need to block the major websites like facebook, myspace, aimexpress, etc.

Any lesser grade levels wouldn't benefit as much unless it was a computer class.
 
I spend 4-6 hours a day in lecture, every day. For example, a few years back... I was taking a history class, all lecture. The instructor was a WWII veteran, and as you can imagine... The topic would jump from prussia to those "that reminds me of this one time" stories, which seemingly jump out of nowhere. My classes now, one teachers style is to somewhat ramble on about a topic, and jump back and forth between different topics, making it fairly difficult to take notes. My other instructor just goes along without jumping around, but is fairly fast with giving out information. Either way, in this class im required to put together a typed version of my notes, with illustrations, definitions of terms etc... usually comes out to 100-150 pages of notes when typed (not double or triple spaced)... This is per-quarter.

As far as my hand writing goes... precision movements while holding something is not one of my strong traits, it never ever was. I can take a half hour per sentance and make it look like I used stencils (and end up having my hand feel like I smashed it with a hammer), or I can write at the rate that someone talks, and have it look like a cross between arabic, egyptian hyroglypics, and what a toddler might draw all over the walls with a crayon. Over the past years of lecture classes, Ive just learned to form some of my own symbols for different sounds in words (such as -tion, -ing) , and all of my letters such as d,a,u,g,n all look exactly the same. can write fast, but ill be damned if I can read it a week later. Im not suggesting everyone needs to learn short-hand, but a laptop or handheld will not always be there for you, would be a good idea to do things without them.

Note-taking using pen/pencil and paper is probably something that should be learned in high school, not only will you need to take notes in college, but at work depending on what your doing... especially if its a technical job, where you have to ask multiple people/customers on a job-site what they did before something broke, what they did to try and fix it, who touched it last, etc... Because customers are always the easiest, most reasonable people to work with, who always give you correct detailed information ;) (sarcasm).

Yes, typing is much easier, but Ive been told by instructors that people who usually end up typing notes do far worse on tests because:
1)people retain information far better by writing it down.
2)people who are typing up what the instructor is lecturing, usually are focusing on typing and not listening to what is being said
3)people who write it down on paper have to go back and re-type it, effectively re-going over the lectures.

To sum this rambling post up:

*K-12 computer access is nice for kids... fairly hard to make it in the world if you have no idea how to use a computer, unless your life-goals are to work at McDonalds. Though, ill just say this about using computers vs books for school research "Wikipedia is not a replacement for a real book".

*Laptops in college : A laptop or handheld is very nice with helping you remember what is due when, and with taking down notes complimentary to hand-written notes and drawings. And if your like me and nearly everyone else, a laptop with internet access or any form of entertainment in a mind-numbingly boring 2-hour long lecture with no breaks, means your not going to pay much attention to what is going on regardless.

* Last, and arguably the most valid point : If your old enough to attend college, your old enough to decide whether to pay attention in class, or use myspace and games on a laptop. Its no longer grade school, you make your own decisions about what you want to do with your money and education... Whatever works for you, as long as its not bothering anyone else.
 
Laptops are fine, if the student want to bring their own to class to benefit their education than they can. My college allows this.
 
It doesn't matter what technology is put into the hands of a student - be it a laptop or an abacus. In K-12 schools, the most important facet of student achievement is parental involvement and interest in their child's education. Until parents or guardians show by example that education is to be the child's priority - not t-ball, soccer, karate, child beauty pageants, etc - then children will not respect anything put into their hands for the sake of learning.

As a teacher I've seen poor little country schools whip the ever living shit out of rich suburban schools in test scores and other achievement factors because parents see the school as their child's best way to a better life. There's a correlation between the percentage of time a parent spends in communication with their child's teacher(s) and how the child will perform academically. Parents who spend more time transporting their child to and from (insert sport/activity here) than they do sitting together at the kitchen table doing homework are far more likely to have kids who will not reach the fullness of their potential.

If a school system wants to throw money at students in the form of portable technology, then fine. The system should also have the balls to require parents to attend training sessions and dedicate a certain amount of hours a week to working with their child on it. Only then will it be a halfway worthwhile investment at any level.
 
Student's like myself, who had and still have documented writing disabilities and whose writing is SOOOOOOOOO horrible, even we cannot read it sometimes.

Those would be the best students to have a laptop and the best reason for the laptop in the classroom is this same reason, so teachers can put tests on them, grade the tests quickly, and not have to use all the paper they use or the time to fight through reading a bad handwriters writing.
 
every student should have easy access to a computer. every student doesnt need a laptop in class.
 
i think we need modern classrooms... computer for each student... but mix in stuff to keep kids from boredom... movies, chalk board notes, hand notes, short answer written responses, short answer online typing, lots of pictures, research confusing vocab online, allow kids to use online dictionaries (would be great reaching my ESL/ELL students)

laptops are an issue... 1k laptop or 500$pc? why not just have enough pcs for each classroom.... rather then laptop liabilities.

students benefit from a little of everything... if you only lecture.... you'll have tons of kids sleeping or pretending to listen... if you only read... they eventually tune out... if you only play movies they slack off... but you need to mix alot of teaching methods to keep kids interested.

i think alot of people read this stuff without thinking about actual student needs. students dont handle extremes well and school districts often choose a new fad, then go all out. however, fads dont solve issues. you cant change 55min classes to block 90 min schedules in milwaukee, and expect to see the same results as a suburb school without maybe i dont know having chalk boards, maps, computers after year 2000, school supplies, textbooks that can be taken home, notebooks, folders and safety...

there so many factors to compare.
 
The laptop has it's pros and cons in the classroom, but universally in my experience being a college student taking a laptop to class, whenever I had a class without internet access, I usually paid more attention than if I did have internet access. If I didn't bring my computer for whatever reason, I paid much more attention than if I had the computer.

Granted, all of this boils down to how dedicated the student is to learning, and how well the teacher is accomplishing his/her job.

Do I say restrict laptops/computers from the classrooms? No. However, there needs to be some sort of check and balance for those who do have them. Different people learn differently, and it's up to the teacher to insure that the possibility for learning occurs. (Assuming of course, that it's the student's responsibility to actually learn.)
 
Laptops are a problem even at the university level; many of my professors had no laptop warnings in the syllabus. Most students start surfing the web, playing games, or doing work for other classes and all while typing noisily to disrupt others in the class.
 
Silentbob343 said:
Laptops are a problem even at the university level; many of my professors had no laptop warnings in the syllabus. Most students start surfing the web, playing games, or doing work for other classes and all while typing noisily to disrupt others in the class.
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No they are not. The technology is never at fault - it is always the user's fault!!! If a person's grades are suffering at school, it is not because there are distractions on the internet, it is because they do not have enough self-control to stop themselves from abusing said distractions. In college, I had a laptop with internet access in History 1, History 2, Composition 1, Composition 2, and Government 1, and I made an A in every single one of those classes. Why? Because I used the technology correctly for learning purposes and did not abuse it. If your grades suffer because of your laptop, it's your own damn fault. :rolleyes:
 
InorganicMatter said:
No they are not. The technology is never at fault - it is always the user's fault!!! If a person's grades are suffering at school, it is not because there are distractions on the internet, it is because they do not have enough self-control to stop themselves from abusing said distractions. In college, I had a laptop with internet access in History 1, History 2, Composition 1, Composition 2, and Government 1, and I made an A in every single one of those classes. Why? Because I used the technology correctly for learning purposes and did not abuse it. If your grades suffer because of your laptop, it's your own damn fault. :rolleyes:
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A.freaking.Men.
 
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