Laptop Making Them Lazy?

As the school year came to an end, and the inevitable frustrations of an overscheduled calendar, a bit of summer fever, and the ever-popular lack of classroom time to complete all the curricular objectives, present themselves, I was beginning to question if the laptops have make our kids lazy. Things we as teachers have noticed and questioned over the past couple of weeks are that kids are turning in assignments during the class right before it was due. This made us question if they were doing the assignment in the previous class instead of completing them at home as expected. (On the other hand, was it done and they simply forgot to submit it?) Things that we expect to take a lot of time, seem to take less and less time. Now this could be because students have become more adept at figuring out the software, they are better at doing research, and they have gotten faster with getting their ideas into a written document. However, if we as teachers know they are getting faster, is it our obligation to give them more to do?

Are laptop kids getting lazy because they can do things faster? This questions leads my mind down the path of how do we keep them from getting lazy? Do we need to change what we are asking them to do? Are we not challenging them, or making their work relevant enough that they want to take more time to “digest” the buffet of material? Instead of just being the consumer of knowledge, can’t we make them the cook? Or the owner who chooses what they put in the buffet? Or the farmer who originates the components of the buffet??

How do we motivate them to work to their potential? More importantly, how do we motivate them to work beyond their potential to want to gain information for their own personal interest and benefit, not necessarily for the grade? “Seek meaning for self…” The best students don’t always learn for themselves, they learn for the grades. Are we as teacher prepared for the risk takers? Those students who go beyond the basics to learn more for themselves, but it might not fit the tidy assessment or rubric designed by the teacher when the assignment was given.

“Advocates for learning with laptops would say that you can’t measure effectiveness with traditional measures of student performance, as it’s a mismatch in skill sets.” Yes, laptops can be a distraction, but how do we keep them on task with our content? I know I have to change how I design assignments, and the questions I ask them to think and write about. But that isn’t always enough…how do we keep students from becoming lazy?

For an example of how to handle apathy, you can go to http://oneillcbl.ning.com/ and see what their challenge-based learning project is trying to do about it.