[Phys-L] Re: suudent problems wireless in class

[hhaskell at MINDSPRING.COM (Hugh Haskell)]

At 22:55 -0500 12/9/04, Timothy S. Sullivan wrote:
> To a person, every faculty member I talked to said that students IM'ing,
> emailing, gaming, and surfing the net instead of paying attention in
> class was the number one problem with the idea. Everyone I talked to
> said that you have to be absolutely ruthless. If they have laptops then
> they have to be "lids closed". The only exception is when the whole
> class is taking part in a computer based activity that you are
> supervising.
Actually that gives the laptops a bit of an advantage in a
computerized classroom. If they have monitors in front of them, they
can hide behind them and there isn't much the teacher can do, but
with laptops, you can make them close the lids and keep track of the
status of the lids easily. So having laptops can be an advantage. It
gets harder, though, if they are taking class notes on their laptop.
I rather think that that is not the best way to take notes in a
science class, though (hard to do pictures and equations quickly on a
computer), so students shouldn't be using their laptops for that,
anyway.

Hugh
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Hugh Haskell
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<mailto:hhaskell@mindspring.com>

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