Get your laptop out of my class

Nobody doubts that computers are becoming an increasingly important part of our everyday lives.

By HAREL FELDMAN
Educators, devices (photo credit: Thinkstock)
Educators, devices
(photo credit: Thinkstock)
Nobody doubts that computers are becoming an increasingly important part of our everyday lives. Even outside the office, everyone old enough to hold a phone wants the latest smartphone from Apple or Samsung, and it is uncommon to find a household without at least one computer. In fact, computers are so omnipresent that professors and teachers assume you have one available when they hand out assignments by email, or casually mention that they have additional materials available on a website or blog.
Still, while computers have been a useful tool for educators in communicating materials outside of class, their presence within the walls of the classroom has always been a controversial issue.
It is easy to see why educators object to electronic devices sitting on desks during class. A student with a computer has the perfect protection (due to the angle of the screen) from the teacher’s monitoring gaze. The temptation of consequence-free slacking-off is even greater when you take into account that a personal computer has more potential distraction than you can shake a stick at, including movies, music and online video games. This is an even bigger issue considering the record number of students being diagnosed with ADD or ADHD in recent years.
And it isn’t just the student with the laptop who gets distracted. When one student is watching a movie or doing something interesting online, it has a detrimental effect on the concentration of all the other students within visual or auditory range of him. All it takes is one student watching a YouTube video in a middle row for an entire block of students behind the screen to start watching as well (or struggling not to) rather than paying attention to what the teacher is saying.
If incidental distraction isn’t problematic enough, the proliferation of laptops in the classroom can enable troublesome students to create distractions on a whole new level, since laptops provide an invisible means of passing notes. A student with a laptop who is determined not to pay attention in class can entice other students into slacking off by posting or messaging them on Facebook and chat.
STILL, DESPITE the downsides, computers in the classroom have strong advocates among both students and teachers.
Students find that programs like Microsoft OneNote completely transform their note-taking ability from a mere-mortal level to a superhuman one. OneNote lets you take down notes as you would in a notebook, while simultaneously recording audio and video (if you set it to). As you type, it synchronizes the notes with the words the professor is saying, so you can click on any word you typed and it will skip to the part of the recording that occurred at the moment you typed it. This is particularly useful when a student doesn’t entirely understand his or her notes or that particular segment of the lecture.
OneNote also transcribes the audio internally so students can search for a particular word or phrase the lecturer said, even if they never typed it.
Students aren’t the only ones campaigning for laptops in the classroom. Educators like the idea of using computers to eradicate bad handwriting and spelling, especially in the papers of habitual offenders.
The once-onerous task of deciphering what might as well be hieroglyphics has become much easier with clear, comprehensible type fonts. In Israel, classes frequently contain dozens of students, and illegible handwriting makes grading papers nightmarish for a teacher who needs to hand them back in a reasonable amount of time.
Another reason educators like computers is the ability to dispense with hard-copy materials. With an increasing number of digital textbooks and tutorials available free online, as well as whole libraries scanned by Google Books, it makes sense for educators just to hand out links rather than go though the lengthy procedure of getting all students to acquire the correct editions of books – something that frequently takes months. Handing out links also saves the school money, since the digital versions of many books are free or marked down significantly. Many top universities have the materials for their full courses online, including sample papers and tests.
One thing educators hate is plagiarism, which has gotten a lot easier since the digital age ushered in the possibility of Googling and copying existing papers. Services like Turnitin – a website for submitting assignments – enable educators to detect plagiarism instantly and with a surprising degree of accuracy (though they are not perfect) by comparing the students’ papers to online databases. On Turnitin, teachers can correct grammar and spelling errors that the program detects automatically, and then grade the papers directly on the site – including typing in feedback.
Since the invention of the Scantron (which some of you might remember is the computer that automatically grades multiple choice tests by scanning little boxes that the students fill out), it has been obvious that the future of education will involve more computing, not less. It seems futile to fight the progress that is slowly rendering the drudge work generally associated with teaching obsolete. And yet, when a teacher stands before a class and realizes none of her students are even looking at her, we need to ask ourselves if there isn’t something we are losing in the process – and if there is, what we can do to protect the spirit of education even as we rush headlong into its digital future.