I've been getting this question a lot lately from administrators, parents, and taxpayers. The question isn't malicious, but rather comes from folks with a vested interest in making sure that our technology dollars directly benefit students. Does giving teachers laptops directly benefit students? For people who aren't actively teaching in a classroom, that's a hard question to answer.
I don't think it's very hard for teachers to answer the question, though, especially at the secondary level. For most people entering the business world, there is no question that they will have a computer on their desk when they are hired. It might be a laptop, a desktop, a shared desktop facilitated with some sort of flextime arrangement, or even a computer allowance so that the new hire can buy a machine that makes them the most productive. However, it's not terribly likely that they'll just be handed a dry erase marker and a whiteboard, pointed towards a copy machine, and told to go for it.
How can children lead productive and satisfying lives in the 21st century if in school we are having them use technology from the 20th century? The hallmark of the 21st century global workplace is the computer. According to a recent Pew Internet and American Life Project study, "The Digital Disconnect: The Widening Gap between Internet-Savvy Students and Their Schools," students spend 27 hours a week online at home and an average of 15 minutes a week at school. Students are not using computers to any appreciable degree in school because district leaders are not providing computers to students to any appreciable degree.
When we began preparing for our laptop program rollout, teachers were excited but a bit nervous. One thing we've tried to do is give them a chance to communicate with us and with one another about the challenges they see in the year ahead. We began a Google Doc for them to use to share their questions, fears, and frustrations as they thought about how their classroom would change after our 1:1 rollout.
The Net Generation has grown up with information technology. The aptitudes, attitudes, expectations, and learning styles of Net Gen students reflect the environment in which they were raised?one that is decidedly different from that which existed when faculty and administrators were growing up.
This page provides concise information on emerging learning technologies and related practices. Each brief focuses on a single technology or practice and describes:
For hundreds of years verbal messages have been the primary means of explaining ideas to learners. Although verbal learning offers a powerful tool for humans, this book explores ways of going beyond the purely verbal. An alternative to purely verbal presentations is to use multimedia presentations in which people learn from both words and pictures--a situation the author calls multimedia learning. Multimedia encyclopedias have become the latest addition to students' reference tools, and the world wide web is full of messages that combine words and pictures. This book summarizes ten years of research aimed at realizing the promise of multimedia learning.