More and more high schools around the country have been making the switch to laptops in the classroom. Instead of all the students walking around with notebooks in the their book bags, they now are carrying laptops. Some teachers like it because they don't have to worry about students losing assignments and also misplacing an assignment themselves. On the other hand though teachers don't like the laptops because they can't see what the students are doing on their computers so they don't know if they are taking notes or just goofing around on them. My old high school (Langford) just got laptops three years ago and I was talking to a couple of my old teachers and I asked them about their thoughts on the laptops. My History teacher said that he didn't mind them because they avoided the clutter and he said the main concern he had was with the note taking. He decided to have the students email him the notes they took in class at the end of each lecture to make sure that they were doing what they were supposed to do. The other teacher was my Math teacher and he said he rarely used them because it was so to do math on a computer even though the students have tablets (laptops you can write on). He was a firm believer in pencil and paper and thought that computers were just a distraction and made it more of a headache on the teachers because they had to keep a closer eye on if the students were taking notes.
So, is a clean room worth the headache of making sure the students are taking notes or not? Should schools go back to pencil and paper?
