Laptops in Class

Greetings bsh1!I am sure this will be intriguing and fun too! I think laptops are really important to our future in education, so this is a topic that I'm personally really interested in. Without further ado, I give you, the laptop!!Portable College EducationOur system of education is being revolutionized. KhanAcademy shows us that education doesn't have to be stuck in classrooms. Anyone with internet can go online and learn the things that they teach you in school and in college like math and science. We don't have to spend $12000 dollars a year to get educated anymore. We can learn at our own pace and we don't have to come out with $30,000 debt for a degree that we needed to take 3-4 years to earn. In fact, Ivy League colleges are embracing online education (1)! Poorer student like me can get extra college credits for practically nothing!! A laptop would make my education literally portable and easier to access. I could look up data or read course material almost instantly wherever there's internet, any time I want! Our education can literally be just the cost of a laptop. How awesome is that!Instant Data Access!!Imagine that you're sitting in a big auditorium with a teacher lecturing at the front about something and he gets to some phrase or point that you're not sure about. With a laptop, you could easily look it up!Efficient use of TimeInstead of having to lumber down to some local place to use some local PC or instead of being stuck at home learning, a laptop gives you a portable text storage that you can take anywhere with you. I have a chromebook that I can take out, open up some pdf textbook, and even if I have no internet, which is most of the time, I can be doing something productive! During lunch or break at school or during free periods in class, I can take out my laptop and not be wasting my time staring at some TV screen while one of my teachers play a movie or something. This also applies if you already know the school material that a class is teaching to you. Simply, instead of wasting time with redundant knowledge, you could take out your laptop and do anything else!! I mean, if you really need to do something leisurely, at least get it over with when you're not really using your time for anything useful anyway.Efficient use of SpaceImagine carrying a backpack full of notebooks for all of your courses with textbooks and binders and sheets of paper. Now imagine instead that you had a laptop in there instead. That's right! A laptop can be used as your notebooks and textbooks combined! Open notepad or some other word editor and you can instantly start to take notes on some lecture or video. Store it into a file under your course section and literally don't even worry about losing or leaving your stuff somewhere. Instead of having to think about taking care of a bunch of items, you have one item: your laptop!And if you want to go back to find some specific material from your notes, you just have to perform a simple search with some key words and you immediately find what you're looking for. That's way more convenient than flipping through pages of notes, notebooks or textbooks.Saves treesThis is a good side effect of abandoning paper text and note-taking. You're no longer using paper and pencil, wood and lead, to do things. You're indirectly saving trees!The laptop is an amazing little information storage and text editor that can store massive amounts of information. And it's super portable!!!Distraction?One of the things people complain about is that the laptop can be distracting, but think about this: how many students actually waste their time looking stuff up during class? and then how badly does that affect students? The University of Virginia did a test 45 minute meteorology lecture where they had students come in with laptops and look through 12 specific things online like the news during the lecture to simulate what bored students would look up during class. The students told to look things up had worse comprehension scores than the students who didn't. Now 12 things is a lot, and the article kind of expressed doubt that students would even look up 12 things. But these 12 things took only 15 minutes to look through. So based on this experiment, if students look up 12 things in a class, they'd be multitasking only 1/3 of the time.So through this experiment, if you're taking a class on something you don't know about and you multitask, you're going to score about 10% less on an end of lecture test (60% vs. 50%). Not that bad especially since the students were forced to be distracted. The experiment forces students to waste time, assuming students use their laptops for distraction from the start. I'm sure that in a lecture, college students, who take debt or pay a lot of money every year just to learn from those lectures they go to, will use their laptops efficiently and educationally. Imagine this is a lecture on things you've already learned thoroughly on your own time. Wouldn't you literally be wasting 45 minutes in class learning absolutely nothing? Wouldn't it then be better to have your laptop there?If you don't know the material, the laptop can help you to look things up. The classroom doesn't even need to provide internet to keep students from getting distracted, and the laptop would just be better versions of note and text books. To the Future!!Do we even need classrooms in the first place? What if schools are held online? We already have entire courses online. Investing in students' laptops means we no longer need to provide for transportation and facilities and things like that. Total taxpayer money to maintain K-12 schools number $536 billion dollars in 2004-2005(3). Think about how much we'd save if everyone simply connected and studied online? We are moving to a world where education is becoming more digitized, and the laptop is an important part of this future.Laptops are an economy of time, space and money.Laptops complement the revolution of technology in education.(1)http://www.onlineuniversities.net...(2)http://www.washingtonpost.com...;(3)http://www2.ed.gov...What do you think?