I’m back to delight your thirst of knowledge once again!
I’m blogging today to inform you about the use of a useful tool in education. Laptops! Of course this subject is debatable. For example if you look at Sarah Schmidt‘s opinion, buying your children a laptop before he enters university will not be a favor at all. Actually, according to her study laptops are way more distracting in class than useful. According to me this is all relative. Entering university, children (which are by the way now adults) have acquired enough life experience and judgement to do whatever they want with their laptops. The majority of them, who uses their laptop in an efficient way will find great advantages of using their laptops in class.
Indeed, according to a research by the sciencedaily, laptops help students overcome their shyness of asking questions to the teacher. This problem affects a lot of people trust me. I have had personaly faced this problem many times in my student career; asking myself if my question is enough pertient to be asked, if the students are going to laugh at me because everyone understood except me. Well this study proved that students overcame this problem by the simple use of their laptops. I won’t display all the results of this study but the major one that hit me was that at the end of the year, more than half of the students have asked at least one question during the semester. According to my experience and you will surely agree with me, this is remarkable. In a classroom we always noticed the same 3 or 4 students always asking questions which by the way help a lot of students understand. Imagine if everyone who had a question could be able to ask it without any fear. That would be so benefical for all the classroom.
Some of you might then tell me: “Yes of course this tool is useful for universitary students but what about my kids who are in elementary or in high school?” Well I was wondering also if laptops could help them. I found a lot of arguments for and against. However nothing is better than a real study conducted by someone from Montréal University: Thierry Karsenti. Once again I won’t give you all the results but the most important are inevitable. The school in which every student from grade 3 to 11 have had a laptop for the last eight years, has jumped from 66th to 23rd in the provincial rankings and the drop rate has fallen from 39.4% to 22.7%. Students, teachers, interventionists and even school administrators have been surveyed and they all agree that laptops are useful.
Of course I’ve just successfully proved that laptops can be useful in class, but what concrete advantages do they bring? If you go and take a look at the little slideshow about the benefits of laptops, you’ll find out that laptops bring benefits to the teacher, the students and even the family of students using laptops in class. They help student find topics or ideas, they facilitate the students’ group work and they introduce them to technology (even if some of you might tell me that kids nowadays know more than we do according to technology, I must tell you that some kids still aren’t proficient with technology.)
I think I do not have to add anything else. I read my blog over and I could convince an Amish that technology could help them. That being said have a nice day folks!
maxferland 