The practice of use of laptop in my classroom

Before having this discussion on classroom management of laptop, I would like to think over this concern: Is it necessary for me to allow my students to use laptops in class? When do I use laptop in my classroom? For me, this only happens during student-centred activities such as creating oral project or produce creative writing in narrative paragraph or dialogue...and so on, laptop is not allowed during teacher-centred lessons.

Students should be assigned a performance task with clear instruction from teacher, which includes the required academic standard, the step by step instruction of proceeding to the final work, the deadline of submission of their work, the criteria of grading their project...when students have the end in mind, they know where they are heading to, what they are doing and how they are going to achieve it.

This video shows a moment of my students' using laptop to start their writing project.

1) Each group only has one laptop. One student does the note-taking work, and the other members of the group contribute to the content, the expression of their work.

2) When students start to make draft, they can either choose to type Chinese characters into laptop via PinYin, or do the handwriting on a piece of paper, then leave the laptop aside for a while.

As only the classroom laptops are installed Chinese software, if they want to type the draft in computer, they must make effective use of the classtime in order to finish the work on time. It means they do not have time to mess around.

3) Students are clear with the steps of this work for this laptop class. Once the group finishes the draft, then they can use the digital media tools such as audacity, voicethread, window movie maker or photostory3...whatever tools they prefer to apply. Someone might search pictures, someone might be looking for sounds, music fitting in...so later they can combine the puzzles into the whole picture. And most of time, students know where to go to get the picture and music, as they already had the favorite websites in mind.

4) Teacher must walk around the class all the time having eyes on what the students are doing with the laptop. It is necessary always.

No searching of information or browsing websites should be done during classtime. This kind of messing around work should be assigned as homework or carry on in after school time.

5) The case of "One laptop per student " only happens when teacher introduces some useful learning tools, softwares to students, students should have the experiences in trying them.

" Remember, it is about them(students), not you, you do not have to be a master of technology, nor do you have to know everything kids can do with technology. Create a framework for an engaging student-centred assignment and let students surprise you with their innovative contributions!" Management classroom of laptop

The most important thing in a laptop class is to create an engaging student-centred assignment.

Then you do not have to worry about student's distraction.