Greetings from Mumbai
Sorry I missed class on Thursday and Friday, but I’ve been away at a conference in Mumbai, India. The conference is all about using laptops and tablets in the classroom. At the American School here every single student from grade 6-12 brings their own tablet to every class every day. In grades K-5 each student has a tablet that is kept in class that they use every day. The classrooms look very muck like ours at SAS except instead of carrying zipperbags, pencil cases, folders and notebooks to classes, they bring their tablets and stylus. What looks different are some of the activities that can take place when every single student has a tablet in their hands during class. I’ll give you a few examples of some neat stuff I’ve seen.
I was in an RLA class where the students were doing lit circles. Each lit circle had set up a ning about their book. They didn’t need the ning to communicate with each other about the book, but it allowed them to communicate with other groups in other classrooms and other schools about the book. They had even invited the authors to join their nings and a few of them had joined the ning and become active members of it. How exciting would it be to have Rick Riordan personally chat with you about Lightning Thief or have Cornelia Funk respond to your post about Inkheart?
I was in a math class where they were going over homework problems from the previous class. Instead of a traditional set of HW problems, the teacher had posted the problems on Google Wave, a new Google app that allows groups of people from multiple computers to work on the same project. The problems were very challenging and required that the students work together and share ideas; however, the students were not together in the same class. They were all at their own homes but working and communicating together in the “wave.”
Now I want to get some feedback from you. How do you think a program like this would work at SAS? Can you imagine an environment where everyone has a laptop in class instead of traditional notebooks and paper? What do you see as some possible benefits or problems of switching to a system like that? Please post your ideas so your classmates and I can see them.
Mr. Haas' Math Blog 
Just bringing a tablet to school would be wo much better, then there would be no more 100 pound backpacks! Plus, uising the tablet is so cool.
Using tablets would be nice. Plus, we wouldn’t have to bring so much stuff to school.
Yea, I guess it would be pretty awesome, but wouldn’t it be kind of hard to learn how to communicate, and how to use the “wave”? I like school the way it is.
It would be good for the enviroment to use tablets instead of a traditional pencil and paper. But it would take alot of time just to learn how to use the tablets that it takes away from the actual learning. Personaly I don’t like the idea of tablets, school is great the way it is.
It would be cool where everyone has a laptop in class, but using a laptop has a lot of responbibity. I also think traditional notebooks and paper is better for middle schoolers like us.
Wouldn’t it be kinda bad for your eyes, because i already know some kids get spectacles because they spend too much time on the PC. Other than that I think the tablet would be much more simple and efficient during class.
Cool we should definitely have laptops in school. It would be so much easier to take notes and stuff. Especially in Social Studies. But there are some people that would use for games and stuff so i am definitely up with getting a laptop and using it in school
I think that using the tablet would be so awesome! We wouldn’t have such heavy backpacks. But having tablets is quite a responsibility. I like school the way it is, with pencil and paper. It gets us to think harder instead of using tech.
It would be really cool but, it think it woudn’t be that cool, because of you lose your tablet, all your work and your information would be gone and you would be a sad little elf:-)
I like both tablets and pencil and paper. Tablets are cool but pencil and paper is easier.
I think it truly depends on how responsible students can be with modern technology. I mean, a tablet isn’t the cheapest thing in the world, and if students are irresponsible, it gives another opportunity for the destruction of perfectly fine stuff. Also, game/social network disabling might be necessary during school/class. If the tablet could be used JUST for constructive/school purposes, it would be a good thing to have. Trees would be saved, and it would be another step towards saving the environment (not saying that we’ve actually taken many steps, though).
Being able to talk over a blog website with other authors is pretty cool, though you’d have to be careful for what could happen over the net.
The Google Wave thing sounds interesting, I wonder how school would be like if we used that instead of blackboard or, if you forget to write your homework down in class, from another peer. If we could talk to one another about homework without having to call each other up or talking on social networking/chat sites, it would save more time trying to type messages across and waiting for the other person to respond, when they might be doing other things too.
I like the idea of using a tablet, it would be really cool, and fun, too. The only problem is that I’m wondering if your hand would hurt because of the position, and would it be hard to write on?