Why I Like the Netbooks

We are three months into our netbook pilot. As with any tool, you need to exercise your professional judgement. I can see some teachers opting to pull them out at any opportunity with a variety of activities that don't necessarily further students' understanding of concepts, or don't utilize the tool effectively. An example of that might be simply sending kids to a website (that is technology use right?!). That isn't the way that I have, or plan, to use the netbooks.

What I'm really excited about is the ability to go paperless. I've mentioned this previously here. If you follow #edchat on twitter you'll often see mentions of dropboxes, and other paperless tools. We have those in district, cutting out the need for many outside tools or sites. On Friday I opted to have the kiddos do a current events summary of an article on the space shuttle Endeavour (by the way, 2nd to last shuttle launch from NASA). After firing up the netbooks, the kids went to our class wiki to find the article. They opened the article, and most read it on the netbook. Since I had it in Word instead of as a PDF, they were able to highlight information right on the screen (some opted to print, but that was about 10-15% of the kids; I know you could highlight in a PDF assuming you have Acrobat... we just have Reader). Once they finished reading they started typing their summaries, saving them to their network drive. After that they dropped it into a folder in our class dropbox, which makes grading a snap.

Next year I'll likely do two different lessons on finding main ideas. The first will involve printing an article (integrating the netbooks, adding a printer as well- which can be a pain!) and highlighting or underlining on the page. We'll look at the underlined work to see if it encapsulates the article, as well as taking the time to debate which information is essential to understanding the article. The second lesson will be entirely paperless. Once we've worked on the skill, we'll integrate technology through practicing highlighting information (and possibly using the strikethrough tool). I see the possibilities, but also the glaring need to ensure they have success as readers and tech savvy students.