I announced to my classes today that we would no longer use computers in the classroom for the rest of the trimester. Some students were happy, others were annoyed, and a few didn’t know what to think. They had been using computers in the classroom for the past two weeks with my student teacher and now, as I was taking the classes back, I got to make the announcement. 

Here’s some of the thinking that went into the decision to put the computers away and return to writing in composition books.

After I discovered the Moodle framework in 2004, I have used computers in my classroom off and on until three years ago. Then, I decided to stress the question and would try out an interesting idea: What would happen if I had computers for each of my students everyday for the entire grading period? 

Up to this point, I would schedule the computer carts about once a week for in-class quizzes or for specific online conversations that I wanted my students to enjoy. I should also mention that the school that I teach at is not a one-to-one computer school: that is to say, that there isn’t a computer for every student. Instead, we have roughly 12 computer carts that hold about 14 laptops for a student body of roughly 1500 students and about 85 teaching staff. We do have a few standalone computer labs that can be scheduled for class use and we have a media center with approximately 30 computers for student use. We have more computer access than some schools, but we have a lot less than other schools. 

As teachers, we schedule which carts we want on certain days and then the scheduling fury gets a little heated because as a teacher, you need to schedule sometimes weeks in advance. Also, like other schools in our state, there is usually a week or two that we are administering state-required tests that students take on the laptop computers. Things are little tight and usually you’ll see less than half of our staff members use the carts because of the lack of resources. I do think that some staff members would like to use the technology with their students in their classes, but logistically, there’s really not a way to do it. 

Now, back to my second paragraph: I have, for the past three years, checked out two laptop computer carts for almost every day of each trimester for my students to run the entire class through Moodle: schedule, assignments, discussions, messaging and gradebook. And, when I say “checked out” I mean that I would, sometimes, do the scheduling for the next trimester a week or two before the end of the previous trimester. In short: I would try to get a jump on the reservations and typically would schedule out an entire trimester in one sitting (and, as in the current trimester, only have one day where I couldn’t use the carts…during the testing window). 

You have to know that even though I hijacked the computer carts for the past three years, the teaching staff has been fairly supportive of my efforts. I have shared with the staff on a couple of staff development opportunities about Moodle and teaching online. I think that most of the staff has a respect for my knowledge of technology and of pedagogy and that I was doing something with the computers that wasn’t the mere “let’s type your final drafts” use of the carts. It might have been annoying to them when they were also trying to schedule the computers, but in general, I think they just accepted that I had the carts and it meant something. The feedback that I got staff members whose children were my students was that this digital learning was meaningful and it helped prepare their students for the years in college. 

But then, in the past few weeks, I had a chance to evaluate my experiment and after some reading, observation and reflection I realized that I had to test out my current hypothesis that has been nagging me since 1997: Maybe these new technologies are good for initial engagement, but lack the sustaining power of writing and speaking and listening. Maybe, with each new applied science gadget: the iMac, the Palm Pilot, the iPad, comes a thirst for the shiny new thing with the promise that this new shiny new thing will help things get better. 

My working answer to that idea as of last Friday was: probably not. 

Next post: What I read, observed and reflected on last week.