March 22, 2006
Ok, something interesting to post about
Prof. Reynolds laments a fellow law professor who is getting grief for banning laptops from his class.
He points out that several of his colleagues are fed up with them too, mostly because they encourage goofing off and can be a major disruption if the students don't have the volume off.
Not to mention that a million keys clicking is HIGHLY disconcerting when you're trying to talk.
Our school has a unique solution to this problem. We have two classrooms equipped with computer consoles for each student and this technology.
SMART Board also incorporates a functionality that allows the user at the front of the classroom to LOCK OUT the other consoles, forcing the students to follow along with the lecturer, although it allows them to use the software to make notes, which can be emailed to the user or printed at the end of the class.
We love our SMART Boards, and we have them in every classroom.
Damn cool!
Posted by: Margi at March 22, 2006 03:55 PMWow that's a really cool idea. Although sometimes it pays to sit near someone with a laptop. I know I only managed to stay awake during one of my programming classes because I would watch the guy, who sat in front of me, play halo.
Posted by: sagacitas lerin at March 22, 2006 04:38 PMI tried handwriting notes for about two weeks in law school (I had done it in undergrad, not that it's comparable) and said forget it. There's so much info in first year class, particularly, that you need to take notes the fastest way possible. Not only that, but it allowed me to actually look back at my notes at the end of the semester to figure stuff out (something that I never really had to do in undergrad or HS) - there were days when I had three or four pages of typed notes per class, there is no way that those would have been anywhere near legible.
Yeah, we would IM each other and surf the web during the dryer moments of class, but we also used the net to answer questions that the prof didn't necessarily have the answer for.
Posted by: KG at March 22, 2006 05:00 PM
