Why

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We're lucky enough to have a laptop cart in our department. Here are some of the ways I've found laptops useful in the classroom.

How

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• Writing

  Using Google Docs, students can write in class with a real audience. Often, I will have two students write a paragraph together at the same computer. The ensuing awkwardness requires students to constantly explain, consider, and defend choices they might otherwise make without taking notice of other options. Google Docs allows me to check on students' progress (nothing gets somebody back on task like having "STOP MESSING AROUND" suddenly appear on their screen!) and for students to instantly share their writing with each other. Typically, we will write paragraphs, discuss them in groups of four, and then share out the best to project on the wall and discuss as a class.

• Teamwork

  Many students have been finding the online tools we use in class beneficial to their group work outside of class as well. I find it helpful to have laptops in class when students are working on projects so they can set up pages and documents to allow them to continue working later at home.

• Discussion

  One upcoming lesson I'm excited about will be a fishbowl discussion (half the class in the middle, discussing, the other half outside commenting on how the discussion is going). We'll use laptops within the discussion to access the wiki (thereby provoking the important question of how to set norms for productive computer use in a meeting or discussion) and students in the outer circle will use Etherpad to silently chat about the discussion.

• Reading

  I just tried using a wiki for the first time, and it has been very successful. Students who do not feel like strong writers can piggyback on the ideas of others, and perhaps develop the thinking. Students who would ordinarily miss out on the satisfaction of synthesizing a complicated text can use the wiki as a tool to gather related evidence together.
  One benefit I didn't initially discover is that students can have the wiki up during a discussion, allowing them to marshal much more textual evidence in discussion. The wiki has been an excellent tool for supporting reciprocity between discussion and writing.

• Research

  One of the great challenges of research projects is to give students the freedom they need to engage in the research process while keeping tabs on students. It's frustrating to spend the whole class period helping individual students, only to find five or six kids who spent the period completely off-task. When I taught in Palo Alto, a colleague and I used a Google Docs outline and work log to guide our students through the research process. Every group member, and the teacher, had constant access to the instructions, a record of all the work completed so far, and an account of how time had been spent. We were very impressed with the outcome of the project.