Laptops and Students

Today I looked at a chapter from Matt Levinson's book entitled From Fear to Facebook. The chapter comes toward the end of the book and discusses how a laptop program can be beneficial to a school educational program. The chapter discusses both pros and cons of having students use their own laptops on a day to day bases. The chapter highlights some general concerns that I have heard with schools trying to use the 1 to 1 program. This chapter, however, did present a new perspective that I never really thought of. It mentioned that today we are living in a wired wold, meaning that we want everything at our fingertips. We want twitter, Facebook, news, the weather, etc. all at an easy to reach convince. We want to be able to be walking down the street and tell others that follow us online what we are doing. The chapter focuses on how the school was resistant to accept this perspective and thus resulted in some negative attitudes toward students using laptops as an educational tool in the classroom. In my honest opinion, I think people (not all) are resistant to change especially when it comes to technology. Technology is constantly changing. What was new yesterday is now old and outdated today. The best mindset to have, especially with schools, is that technology is a friend not a foo. Once educators, parents, and peers alike realize this then technology success will be great among the educational platforms. At least that was the case of the school in the book.