Secondary school students should be allowed laptops at school.

I probably should have said that in round 1, I forgot because this is my first debate. If my opponent wants to have a different structure for round 3, then they may do so as they please). Rebuttals 1. Students should be smart enough to realise that water and laptops do not mix, and should keep their water bottles away from their laptops. At the high school I have been at for one and a half years, nobody in my year group has ever spilled water on their laptop. They tend to keep their water bottles inside their bag. Also, laptops come in a case (at least, the kind which schools encourage do), so if the water bottle leaks it will not damage the laptop. High school students should be smart enough to prevent these simple ways of damaging their laptop. 2. Laptops can save more paper than recyclable paper notebooks can, because the point of recyclable books is that they are recycled after their use, but a lot of times students do not bother to do this (even though they should). 3. You can always back up your data so if something happens to your laptop you won"t lose all of your data (and it does not cost a lot to do this, all you need is a USB or harddrive). 4. Viruses tend to be spread through attatchments in emails and social networks. It is the student"s responsibility to recognise this (e. g. by scanning the attachment beforehand). Also, virus protection software should be installed and updated monthly; again, it is the student"s responsibility to realise this, because they are told when they sign the contract for bringing a laptop to school. 5. Laptops do not make people become lazier. As I have already mentioned, people are not going to be any less distracted whether they have laptops or not. I have experienced this: once, somebody in my class was caught playing games so he had to close his MacBook. After the teacher went back to the front of the class, he simply took his phone out and started playing under the desk. Whenever the teacher walked past, he would drop the phone into his bag so the teacher would not see. And as for copying assignments, even if they "read and write it a little" they have still copied and will get into trouble. An alternative is to make someone else to write two versions of his essay (some people actually do this) and then they can simply copy away, and the teacher will never know what has happened. 6. Teachers are taught how to use technology, but they do not need to use it". one of my teachers allows us to use our laptops to take notes and do research (but we can use pen and paper if we want), but the teacher does not use her computer at all, except to record our marks and mark the class register. 7. It is possible to track what students are doing" some schools use tracking software, such as LanSchool. Everybody in the school with a laptop is forced to install the software (this is allowed because when they signed the contract for using a laptop, one of the guidelines is that the school has a right to track them), and the class teacher can track what everybody in the class is doing from her desktop screen (again, they are taught how to use the software), unless if the person"s Wi-Fi is not turned on. If this happens, it will say so on the teacher"s screen, and the teacher can tell the person to turn their Wi-Fi on. The tracking software does not work when the student is off campus, so what they are doing at home can"t be tracked by the school. And remember what I said earlier: even if the motivated kids are told off by their teacher, they are still not going to learn and can simply not pay attention in class. 8. Most people store things other than school textbooks in their locker, such as a musical instrument or their sports gear. This does not leave a lot of room for storing textbooks. And don"t forget what I said about lockers being broken into: it is extremely easy to break into somebody"s school locker, it happens at my school very often. People can also steal your laptop, but if this happens they need to be able to figure out your password to do anything to your data, which is very unlikely, especially if you have a strong password. Anyway, if you have backed your data up, you are fine. 9. My thesis is that secondary school laptops should be allowed laptops at school, not that they need to be able to have laptops at school. Even though it is better for a student to have laptop, if a country or school cannot afford it, then that come"s first and the student can live without it, but it is preferable if the student does have a laptop. Also, my earlier suggestion about schools purchasing laptops was only one alternative. What my school does is make everyone buy their own laptop, but if they can"t afford it, they can burrow one of the 30-50 laptops which the school purchases (there are more than 2000 students at my school so this is not a lot) for the day, and when they are done they can store the data on a USB, and return the laptop to the school. Of course, if anything happens to the laptop, the student must pay for the damage. This method is actually quite cheap for the school. Also, sometimes the teacher will want the whole class to be doing the same thing on their laptop (e. g. in a Society and Environment class the teacher might want all of the students to go on an online history quiz, and enter themselves as a competitior in the quiz, which the teacher monitors). Clearly, the benefits of students having laptops highly outweigh their few minor downfalls, because they make students high school lives much easier and enhances their learning experience.