Allison Milam
Eighth-Grade Student, Harpeth Hall School
Working with laptops has helped tremendously in taking notes, doing research, working on projects, and in everyday classwork. I use my laptop to take notes in almost every class. I find it much quicker to type my notes, instead of handwriting them. It helps me stay organized, because I never lose the notes on my laptop and I can organize notes into separate folders, one for each class. It is also very easy to go back and change notes or add to them, even copying previous homework into my daily notes. It is wonderful to be studying for exams and to know exactly where all of my notes and assignments are.
One recent example of using laptops for research is the history project I have been doing. It helped so much to have my own computer to use, instead of having to hurry to the computer lab or trying to save my work on a disk to work on at home. With my laptop, I have learned so much about using the Internet to find information, and I have discovered which sites are the most useful in research. With this knowledge, I was able to easily find information on my topic, and to take notes on it in a Microsoft Word document. It is easy to copy and paste pictures from the Internet, and even find relevant maps and timelines. I also learned appropriate ways to cite what we found and used. All of this information would have been much harder to find without my laptop. In another research project I used an Encarta program to take notes on digital notecards, which I could organize and move around until they fit into an outline. This program allowed me to be organized in my research and it helped me in formatting the outline of my paper.
Another area where laptops have been extremely important to me is in science. Often in experiments we will use a special program and temperature sensor to record and graph the temperature of a substance on the computer. This allows us to learn about the substance and its melting and boiling points. I cannot even imagine trying to do that without my laptop. Using a laptop in science helps me to be involved in experiments and research and helps me to understand and analyze data from previous experiments. Besides all of these benefits, my laptop seems to just make my classes more fun and interesting, drawing me into lectures, experiments, and research in a way that did not happen before.
Click on a link below to move on to comments from another student or to return to previous pages in the article.
Reading Online, www.readingonline.org
Posted February 2002
© 2002 International Reading Association, Inc. ISSN 1096-1232