Classroom Laptop Use & A Best Practice to Add

Laptop carts are a classic case of an area where students might accumulate, linger and get rowdy. With each cart being accessible to realistically only two students at a time (even that many constitute a crowd), when more than two students try to get laptops from the cart, there is inevitably conflict. I should say that I'm speaking of 6th and 7th graders. To minimize crowding and potential conflict, I ask that students take turns to collect laptops, with students waiting until the group before them has collected their computers.

With my students, there are also issues of proper care, so I have assigned them a number which corresponds to a computer on a particular cart. Students know that they are accountable for their particular computer and if theirs is not properly stored or located, they will have to check the entire cart before leaving on the following day.

As we at ISBangkok are not a one-to-one school regarding computers, we share the carts between classrooms. Often computers arrive non-functional or without a charged battery. Sometimes one computer's wireless card isn't working. Sometimes one computer does not load a student's profile. Rather than solve the problem by asking students to double up, I make sure to have extra computers on hand so that a student can use a back-up computer if necessary. I'd say that the need for extra computers comes up at least once each class.

Beyond these basic practices of mine, I've gotten some new ideas from a blog post at Design 4 Learning called 23 Things about Classroom Laptops. One has been to not use labtops like textbooks. When I've done some writing activities, I've asked students to use a Word Document because I feel they spend more time and give the writing more care than if they handwrite it. But I'm missing out on the opportunity for students to include images, videos and links to various related websites. In other words, I've been using the laptop a bit like a textbook, when I should be maximizing it's usage and letting kids "go digital," which would no doubt be more engaging to them. I could imagine that a student would take more pride and more stake in the writing portion of an assignment if they were generally more motivated in the assignment because it included multimedia.