Enhancing Learning with Laptops in the Classroom pt1

Thanks to Diane Pike who dropped “Enhancing Learning with Laptops in the Classroom” (ISBN: 0-7879-8049-8) into my campus mail box. It’s making its way around the Academic LFCs. I’m reading some of the articles pertaining to the Natural Sciences.

First, I don’t think a laptop U is the right direction for a small institution like Augsburg. Student Computing has noted that something in the realm of 80% or more of the incoming students have computers, with more and more being laptops. Requiring the students to get another laptop meeting the institution’s requirements (assuming theirs does not) is bad way to start the relationship.

That being said, the examples in the book don’t require student laptops. They are applicable to departmental laptops (i.e. Biology, Chemistry, and hopefully Physics) or to computer labs. With computer labs, a space that is configured in a multi-use layout like Foss 22B or the Honors Lab seem best. A traditional classroom row layout would hinder the group activities. The major activity categories — student data collection, student assessment, student self-assessment and student research — all sound like active learning / inquiry-based learning which I think suit the learning styles of the Net Generation.

Here’s a summary of the first article:

• Teaching Statistics by Taking Advantage of the Laptop’s Ubiquity: The faculty member likes to create communities of learning and found laptops help achieve that goal. He also subscribes a bit to just-in-time teaching and likes to have student input drive the daily sessions with the syllabus being the road map for the course. Oh, he also likes peer-based learning. Basically, he’s a good fit for this model.
  He used discussion boards in their CMS very effectively to support all 3 of the characteristics I just noted. Apparently he used paper-based questions on the readings before — what a nightmare! He also used pre-class online quizzes on the readings to help students practice and to provide him with guidance as to what to do that day. I like this strategy a lot. However, creating the quizzes can be time-consuming the first time. But once you have a quiz bank setup, updating the questions is easy.
  His example activity of understanding a variable and computing expected value and variance speak more to an approach of having the students actively work through the concepts in class with real data. This is just what Math students could do with Mathematica in a Calculus lab, and often do at Augsburg.
  An interesting side note, he noted the desire for the CMS to have a rating system for the student posts. Hhhmm, moodle does that. 🙂