A Laptop For Every Student

    Is it necessary? Does it help students learn better? If every student in the classroom has a laptop to themselves is the learning any better than without them in the classroom? Some teacher say yes! They say it motivates the students more to to the work and it teaches more real life skills. I can agree to that. The students today are digital natives, meaning they have grown up using technology. Having access to the internet allows students to look terms up they might not understand in the lecture right then and there. It also helps with organization for notes and other information. Laptops would also be a great way for collaboration in the classroom with students working on projects and gathering more information and faster. 

   Yet, even if this sounds so great, there are down falls. If you as a teacher relies so much of your teaching to be done through the laptops what happens if the internet goes down or some other odd situation occurs. What do you do? Your whole lesson plan is changed. Or students can easily be distracted when the internet is right there in front of them. The games they play at home and for older students that have social networks. Another down fall is students writing and spelling skills. When working on a computer all day your writing is being corrected, if there is a grammar problem the green line shows up under the problem. If there is a spelling error the red line appears. Not only does it point it out, BUT it will correct it for you. The students are not going to learn correct grammar on their own nor will their spelling be good.

  I do believe that having laptops available for every student in the classroom is important, but I do not feel like they need to have them all the time. Use the technology to enhance certain lessons or projects, but not every lesson of every day. A lot of my ideas were based from reading the article on Mulitmedia in the classroom.

   image from Flickr.com by ctkmcmillian