This week, after reading Lee Skallerup’s excellent post “In Class Distractions Are Nothing New” at College Ready Writing, I sent Lee a message on Twitter that sparked a long and productive conversation among many people about laptops in the college classroom (I’ve embedded that conversation below). In short, I’ve never banned laptops from my classroom, but I will confess I’ve been tempted. My problem with laptops isn’t that they distract individual students—a student who wants to be distracted can do so with pen and paper—but that laptops can so easily distract all those around the students using them.

But laptops can also be valuable assets in the classroom (see Mark’s post about Going Paperless in the Classroom or Amy’s about Ditching a Textbook, for example), and so, no matter how frustrated I get with an individual student’s laptop use, I do not ban them. Instead, each year I hone a…

Read More