I have a couple of concerns regarding the use of laptops as one of the most fundamental means of learning – were this to happen, of course.

The financial burden, the security issues, the inconvenience of having to carry them to school everyday, the concerns about distractions have all been mentioned repeatedly. But these obvious disadvantages aside, I would like to take a different vantage point to discuss the benefits and disadvantages of this 1:1 laptop program.

I will be blunt; I think excessive use of computers will have exceedingly deleterious consequences on students. I came to CA 4 years ago from South Korea, and I had studied at a Korean public school for many years. When I came to CA, I was rather surprised that most 7th and 8th graders were still having ‘problems’ with simple arithmetic. Now, some students may say: “What? I never had trouble with arithmetic.”
I’m sorry to say this, but the vast majority of CA students, in my opinion, do, or at least did at some point. I am ashamed to say that now even I feel like I am having minor troubles. I must clarify what I mean by “problems.” Of course, if you give a person who is relatively incompetent in math 10 minutes to figure out what 12 times 12 is, he or she will have no problem. When I say “problems”, I’m not just talking about understanding the concept but actually being able to do it at a reasonable speed and rate. I will be frank; in my 7th grade math class had to complete the multiplication table of up to 12 times 12, and the teacher would time us. I think most people finished it in 6, 7 minutes. I guarantee to you Japanese Elementary public school kids – most of them – can finish it in 2 or 3. I am very, very, very positive that our perennial over-dependence on calculators has debilitated our computation skills. I, personally, became much slower at calculating and solving math problems than I was in 7th grade when I first came here.

Now, I must acknowledge and concede that technology has its benefits, too. It allows us “faster” access to the cornucopia of resources and information on the web; it allows us “faster” note-taking and etc., However, I say it is only “faster” not more efficient. If students have laptops with them in class, yes, they will be able to take notes without missing any information, because, obviously, typing is much “faster” than hand writing for most students. But conversely, what must we do when we do not have access to that “faster” means to take notes? We learn to pick out the essential information, discard the less important, and consequently, during that process, learn to prioritize perceived information according to their pertinence. The purpose of note-taking is not to jot down every single word that comes out of the teacher’s mouth; it is to organize the provided material and information, make sense out of them intellectually and process them in our minds. My conclusion? Note taking by hand is more efficient & beneficial in the long run than doing so by using computers is.

I think I have heard over and over from various documentaries and TV shows that our brains, when we are using electronics, are not as “active” as they are when we are doing things that require mobility and maneuver of our body. I once read an article that a best way to “rote memorize” a bunch of information is to perceive visually, to write and to read it ‘out loud’ all at the same time. This, I think, shows how important, effective, and efficient a means of learning “hand writing” is. Frankly, if CA adopted the 1:1 laptop program, I would be happy – really happy. Why? It will make my life so much easier in many ways, just like being allowed to use calculators at school for the first time did when I transferred to CA. At the same time I have also witnessed how how I, myself, began to rely more and more on calculators, at times quite unnecessarily.

Now this is something interesting I discovered about a year or so ago. It’s something from a program called PISA. The Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) is a triennial world-wide test of 15-year-old school children’s scholastic performance, the implementation of which is coordinated by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). The aim of the PISA study is to test and compare school children’s performance across the world, with a view to improving educational methods and outcomes.

In recent years, as globalization and the explosion of wealth and resources in previously underdeveloped nations have taken place, some countries seem to be outperforming other nations in areas of math, reading literacy, science, and problem solving. I’m sure the data is available on the internet, so please go ahead and look at it. I just wanted to point out that are some countries that consistently ranking in top 20 of these lists in almost every single area of learning I mentioned above. Finland, Hong Kong, Taiwan, South Korea, and Japan. Recognizing that the United States spends substantially larger amounts of money on education than any of these top-scoring nations do – both per capita and nationally – it is almost hard to believe that children from the U.S. are performing so poorly. In fact, what worries me the most, I think, is that our school education so closely resembles the conventional education system and methods that are widely employed in the United States, and our school, despite being in international school located in Japan, will little-by-little fall into the trajectory and trend of quagmire the U.S. education has gotten itself into.

I’d like to add that any good teacher, no matter what the tools used in their classroom, should be well versed in strategies to quell any distracted behaviour in students. I would hope that no matter how content is delivered, our teachers at CA would be tuned in enough to each student and aware of how they spend their class time.

One important myth of 1:1 laptop programs is that it replaces face time with teachers; I think we all value the student-teacher interaction that makes CA a vibrant and successful learning institution. The hope, of course, with any such pilot, is to find ways to make our school and her students even more successful and prepared for the future that awaits them.