[bigthboy]

From my position, I see two root causes why this is the problem and they could be fixed (its what my venture is working on doing). The problem with laptops most notably is the fact that they have this screen. The screen more or less creates a barrier between the person and speaker. This is not a good thing, especially not in a classroom and its also disrepsectful to the speaker. The second is laptops that are not being used for education but rather, as the article writer suggested, for Instant Messaging or other various purposes. If, theoretically, the laptop was one that was specifically designed and built for use in the classroom by students on a day-to-day basis, the problems addressed in this article would not be an issue. However, because they aren't, many times students don't have adequate tools on their laptops, the tools that are there are time consuming and hard to switch between for doing multiple things at one time, and they aren't focused on anything educationally enriching.

[promo]That's exactly what my venture, EDunuity, is working to address.[/promo]

[silencio]

How you determine what tools the students need in the first place? I've used laptops heavily for almost all my classes for the past few years now (obviously I can't take a laptop to a ceramics class, for example) and the tools I use depends on the class.

For most classes I can get away with using textmate, voodoopad and word (yuck). However, for classes with lots of diagrams I can't easily reproduce on the computer, I'll take out the tablet and use it with voodoopad specifically. Another person using a laptop in my class just brings a digital camera and takes pictures. There was one class I had where someone else wanted to take notes with me, so we used google docs in class. But I don't do that in a CS class, where I usually just bring out my IDE of choice and start hacking away and occasionally take notes.

Just a thought.

[bigthboy]

Well, the determination was made partly on what I and my co-founder have both experienced (being we're both students, freshmen in college), and additional talking we've done with both teachers and students in various types of classes. We've also done a fair amount of reading from studies about the usage of laptops/tablets in the classroom and read opinion articles like these to observe the issues.

In your case, you're one of the students who has already made that digital jump over and has all the gear you need. You, being the geek that I'll assume you are (-don't take that as an insult, I am too...), got these tools and self taught them and are self disciplined in their usage. However, most students and most schools don't have this.

While my venture is specifically interested in K12, we are interested in college too. For most classes (a ceramics class could be an exception), you have your basic necessities and then some additional tools you could be using. That's what we're focused on in our works, is creating the basics in a way that can be easily and seamlessly used in classes so that every student has access to the tools and resources they need, and with a certain degree of personalization to fit the different needs of different people.