by Wendy Brumback

Created on: February 16, 2010

The debate about laptops in the classroom remains strong.  Some believe that the constant sound of the keyboard tapping can distract both the professor and other students.  But using a laptop in the classroom can provide benefits that far outweigh the consequences.

The first is that for most students, they can type faster than they can write.  This allows for maximum notes.  A student can not only write what the teacher is saying, but their own observations as well.  The argument is that a recorder will do the job just as well, but there is a down side.  Most students already have a laptop, using a recorder means they have to dish out the money to buy one.  Also a student can place a recorder on the table and then not pay attention, or even hand it over to another student and skip class all together.  The laptop requires a student to be present and listen.  A recorder also has the down side of not picking up the teachers voice.

Another great advantage is the invention of Wireless internet.  A student can look up information the teacher has given them or input websites a professor has suggested.  The information is right at hand for the student.  Because of this they can engage in the lecture with information they might not have known before, or even debate the teachers information.  Argued here is that a student will play around on the internet rather than listen to the professor.  This however is unlikely for two reasons.  Most students in college are there to learn, so they are less likely to play around in class.  The other reason is that it is just as easier to play on the internet in their dorm room than it is in the classroom.  The dorm room has the added bonus of not having to go anywhere and the ability to look at whatever you want to without having a classroom full of kids looking at the same thing you are.

Oddly another reason laptops are a plus is because of handwriting.   Some people just don’t have nice penmanship.  And there are even more that write sloppier the faster they write.  A student may be missing information because they can’t read their own handwriting.  Also included in this is the fact that they may write slower than the teacher can talk. Missing information means that the student isn’t learning to their full positional.

Finally using a laptop in the classroom means that the information they need is already in the place they will do the most studying. By having the notes in the computer they can post links directly to the body of the notes as well as adding pictures and graphs.  It can be argued that notes can always be rewritten on the computer later.  And while this is true, the above mentioned handwriting could be a problem as well as the idea of time.  A college student’s time is very valuable.  Is it fair to ask the student to spend valuable studying time copying notes rather than writing a paper?

The truth is that this is the twenty-first century.  Technology is a big part of our everyday lives. To leave it out of the classroom is to leave it out of our education.  Without it our students’ education will be lagging behind the rest of the world.

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