Properly integrated into classrooms, laptops bring learning to new levels
By Joe Mullich
At Lilla G. Frederick Pilot Middle School (LGF), students don’t just diagram a sentence. They film a sentence.
English students at LGF were instructed to think up a sentence with a prepositional phrase—“Jimmy jumped on a table”—and then create a short video of the sentence, which their classmates viewed on their laptops. “You never saw so much laughter and giggles,” says principal Deb Socia. “And I guarantee none of those students will ever forget what a preposition is.”
LGF has become the showcase for the growing belief that laptop computers, properly integrated into classrooms, can have a profound effect on how students learn and act. The inner-city middle school is located in a gang-ridden area in the Dorchester neighborhood of Boston. Thirty percent of the 670 students have special needs, and nine in 10 are considered low income.
In 2007, a program was initiated to give each student a laptop and integrate the technology into instruction in a meaningful way. At any given time, about one-third of the classrooms are engaged in some technology-related activities. Students blog immediately when they come into class to settle in. They’ve written and recorded their own protest songs on their laptops while studying the First Amendment.
Stronger Connections
While laptops may have started as a business tool, their role in education is only now being fully explored—both in Third World countries with limited access to formal education and Westernized education systems. They are being used to support overburdened school districts with limited teaching resources; enhance critical thinking and academic success; and strengthen student and parental participation in the learning process.
A recent study in the Journal of Technology, Learning, and Assessment found students in one-to-one computer settings like LGF outperformed peers in traditional classrooms. In a single year, 20 percent of LGF students increased their reading skills by two grade levels. The number of students referred to LGF’s principal or other intervention specialists for disciplinary reasons has dropped from 500 to 100 in two years. Prior to a flu outbreak, Socia says attendance levels had increased.
LGF is championing the notion that laptops have their greatest impact in the classroom by engaging students, teachers and parents in creative, new ways. “People assume that if students are using individual laptops they can’t be collaborating,” Socia says. “But if they are blogging, we use a LCD projector to show the blogs on the board so the students can comment on each other’s work. The students can e-mail their writing to a classmate for peer-to-peer editing in ten seconds.”
This dovetails with studies that indicate laptops shift instruction from lectures to individual and group projects. At LGF, teachers use the technology to differentiate their instruction based on the special needs or learning levels of a student. A crucial aspect for LGF is the inclusion of parents, many of whom have never touched a computer before. Hundreds of families have joined the Technology Goes Home program, where they are provided with training and a netbook to use at home.
“The parents take the computer home and the child becomes the teacher,” Socia says. “They sit together and it improves the relationship. It’s a win-win situation.” Parents now hop online and check their children’s homework assignments and grades.
Taking College by Storm
In a study recently published in Computers in Education Journal, 78 percent of students agreed the laptops made them more engaged and about half said they were more attentive as a result of the technology. About seven in 10 students said the laptops had a positive effect on their learning.
Case in point: Perry Samson, Ph.D., a meteorologist and professor at the University of Michigan, teaches a lecture class in Extreme Weather. He explains how tornados form and why climate change may result in more intense hurricanes. Now he’s shaking up education with a robust interactive response system called LectureTools, which makes use of the laptops his students carry into his lecture hall.
During class, students can view Professor Samson’s PowerPoint slides on their laptops and take notes directly on the slides. Using a chat window, the students can anonymously ask the teacher’s aide questions during the lecture. Professor Samson can see the questions, too, providing him with valuable insight into the student’s comprehension of his lecture without disrupting the flow of the class. Students can also rate their understanding of the slides, giving him more immediate feedback.
“It’s sobering,” Professor Samson says. “I always thought I was God’s gift to lecturing; now I realize how confused the students were before they could ask questions.”
After laughing, he continues: “The students can ask what they think is a dumb question without fear. In the 30 years I’ve taught, there are usually only five or six students in a 300-student lecture class who had the chutzpah to raise their hand and ask a question. Now, with this system, two-thirds of the students are asking questions.”
During class, students can use their laptops to answer multiple-choice questions and image-based questions, such as locating weather patterns on a map. “By how they answer questions, I can see which students are in trouble before the first exam and which require more attention,” Professor Samson says.
Skeptics have been concerned that students will use laptops for too much play and not enough work. But Professor Samson says he’s proven otherwise. “The key is to engage students through their laptops, so they don’t drift off to social networking sites. And we’ve shown you can do that.”
Joe Mullich has written for InformationWeek, PC Week, Network Computing and Family PC.
