Going Digital 9: HS Laptop Program

The first quarter of the school year recently ended and with it the first quarter of the WBAIS high school laptop program. Without a doubt, across the the wide spectrum of the high school curriculum, each student's laptop clearly functions as an essential in-class learning tool.

In science, students analyze animations, do simulations, and create labs straight on their laptops rather than through overhead projection. Also, students often answer teacher-generated questions on their laptops to show that they can apply concepts learned. During labs the students work with laptops by reading instructions and filling in tables with data from experiments. Specifically in physics, students draw graphs using computer applications, especially programs for regression lines for various correlations between variables.

In Middle East History, as a small group of students discuss thought-provoking issues in the center of the class, the other class members backchannel, allowing them to be "quiet" participants through live blogging comment and reflection. Later on their teacher has easy access to their comments and reviews, offers feedback, and evaluates their backchanneling.

Students in AP English 11 have benefitted from the technology to develop their cross-curricular research notecards and outlines as well as to search on-line using many internet resources and search engines. Yes, students still use books for research but now more than ever they incorporate on-line books through sites like Questia and GoogleBooks.

In other ways in the humanities classes students employ laptops. In several social studies classes, power point presentations are viewed through Blackboard as reviews for tests; in AP English, students see posted documents in Blackboard, replacing multiple paper copies; in AP English 12, students blog their creative writing and then share via the internet or through the class projector. And in Art History, students create charts for each unit (ie. Egyptian, Near Eastern, Greek, etc.), allowing them to insert the most pertinent information such as the name of art piece, its date, the culture, the important characteristics – all of which is a fantastic learning and study tool.

The Study Skills course unit on Information Literacy allows students learn how to search the Internet, to stay safe online, and to use digital collections and Web 2.0 tools for research papers.

Resource and ELL teachers utilize laptops in many ways too. Inspiration and its sister program Webspiration, software programs that help students who have written language deficits, are visual graphic organizers that help students with the pre-writing stage by turning ideas into an outline. Also, simple word processing on laptops greatly enhances how well teachers can foster student learning and improve the steps of the writing process. And students in Resource classes take advantage of a variety of assistive technology programs to address their learning needs like Kurzweil, which reads text and also allows students to highlight and extract highlighted text in a formatted manner. It is a tool that teachers can use for testing too.

In the Modern Language Department, laptops are integral. Students access online newspapers and read texts based on individual reading skills. Videos and speakers are also available for oral comprehension, and students blog in writing or report back orally using their laptops. Specifically in upper level and AP Spanish, students experience interactive exercises and online literary readings.

Finally, in mathematics, laptops often figure in class learning. Geometer's Sketchpad, a dynamic software for exploring math, enables the students to examine, construct and measure geometric sketches in a tangible, visual way, which reinforces a more complete understanding of the core concepts of Geometry. In Algebra, Excel is also a great asset in improving student evaluation of expressions. Also, students sometimes work with a math website to solve a series of problems to unlock a number of boxes to win. The answers to the problems are then used as the address to get to the next box. And like in many subjects, worksheets and lab activities appear on Blackboard for the students rather than on photocopied pages.

Even though our high school laptop program has only been functioning for a few months, teachers and students clearly have discovered many benefits with the technology. No doubt student laptop usage will continue to grow. Teachers will discover and apply more innovative educational activities with the technology. And students will continue to learn on the cutting edge of technology.