As ISB moves to a one-to-one status for the sixth grade class next year, those students will have a powerful tool at their disposal 24/7. It remains to be seen how effectively the sixth grade students as well as the rest of the Middle School students take advantage of the laptops. I have noticed that many students in my seventh grade Humanities class waste a considerable amount of time when they use laptops for in-class assignments. Therefore, I need to develop stricter protocols for students who use laptops during class time.
Some questions come to mind for managing student laptop use in the classroom. For example, how does the teacher know what all the students are doing at a given time? In order to know how students are using their time, the first protocol guideline should be a time limit and a specific goal to accomplish during that time. Too often students appear to be at work on the laptop when in fact they are way off task. There can be a way to check on whether students have met the goal within the time limit. Students can print and hand in what they have accomplished, or they can post their work to GoogleDocs which will make it much easier for the teacher to check on the work.
Another guideline for written work should be the often-used audience and purpose: who are the students writing for and what is the purpose for their writing? Students should be required to go through all of the self-editing, peer- editing and teacher/student-editing steps that they now go through for non-blog writing.
If students are given concrete goals to accomplish within a specific time limit they will make better use of their computer time. A little bit of front loading on the teacher’s part will generate greater student accountability for their own learning.
I completely agree that concrete goals and time limits are critical. I also think your point about audience and purpose is even more important with all of the web-based work we are sharing. It seems like we're often writing for "the world" but with no real possibility that anyone else will see our work - at the K12 level, it's likely necessary that the teacher select and foster a specific audience for web-based writing (blogs, Google Docs, whatever). Audience needs to be both defined and real - not the generic "anyone who has internet access" that we tend to use so much (myself included).
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