Kristen Meltesen
Eighth-Grade English Teacher, Harpeth Hall School
The 2000-2001 school year was the official beginning of Harpeth Hall’s laptop program and, as a second-year eighth-grade English teacher, I believe I had a unique perspective on assessing the impact laptops had in my classroom. The value of preparing students to meet the demands of an increasingly computerized world is the focus of most articles about laptop schools. I, however, will focus on observations of the students in my class.
Teenage girls are not, by nature, organized individuals. Last year, a plethora of papers littered my classroom, and every afternoon, girls would come in trying to find the ones they had misplaced. This year, laptops have virtually eliminated this problem. With a click of the mouse, students access documents and information from the folders and subfolders named and organized to suit their individual needs. The laptops allow my students to be organized on their own terms and in their own unique ways. Laptops work for them in organizing schoolwork within their chaotic lives.
Helping students use the Internet as a research tool, and making use of Internet resources myself, seems to me a natural extension of my work as an English teacher. Simply lecturing to students about the civil rights movement in conjunction with our study of Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird can hardly compare with having them reinforce what they have learned by accessing online photos and newspaper articles while in my classroom. However, while facilitating ancillary research about a novel is certainly valuable, it has not been the laptop program’s greatest success at Harpeth Hall School. Instead, the most significant benefits seem to have come in the area of organization.
For the last 2 years, for example, each eighth-grade student has been expected to research and write a paper about a person or event pertinent to her study of Spanish, French, or Latin. This project bridges both the foreign language requirement and the research and writing requirement in English. In my first year at the school, before the laptop program was begun, the girls recorded their information on scads of note cards, but they appeared to have no systematic scheme for organizing the cards in a way that would support their writing. When it came time to write the paper, note cards were discovered to be missing, and creating a workable outline seemed a daunting task. Essentially, the girls did not know where to begin.
The advent of the laptop program made this year’s language research paper a breeze. After researching both on the Web and in the library stacks, the girls were introduced to Inspiration, a brainstorming and organizing software tool aimed at meeting the needs of varied learning styles. Whether the girls chose to organize related information in connected bubbles or opted for a traditional outline format, the software met their individual needs as they conceptualized their project. With the software’s bubble format, for example, girls were able to organize information with a personal touch. Some opted to group topic subsections by different shapes or colors: topic A might be a series of interconnected green rectangles, while topic B consisted of interconnected purple triangles. The girls were able to organize their work in a way that made sense to them, thereby simplifying their subsequent writing and allowing them to infuse relevant content into their papers.
The laptops also brought new meaning to the word “notecard.” The girls were able to generate electronic note cards using Microsoft’s Encarta Research Organizer, completely changing the note-taking process. With Encarta, not only were the girls freed from the task of keeping up with more than a hundred small cards, but they were taught to cite and organize their information. When creating a note card in Encarta, students are prompted to include vital “works cited” information and to keep track of all appropriate publication data. The necessity of filling in this information before moving on to the next electronic note card makes citing sources (and avoiding the temptation to plagiarize) much easier. In addition, each Encarta note card must be placed in an electronic outline, which forces students to organize their research according to subject matter and, once again, simplifies the writing process.
This year, the language research paper was a significant learning experience. Students and teachers alike learned new and more effective ways to organize information. The girls were more in control of their research from start to finish. They were able to use creative, individual ways to organize their information, making the desired result -- a well-written research paper -- much easier to achieve. Having laptops in the classroom during this project empowered students to think creatively in organizing their work, while teaching them valuable research skills.
I invite you to explore the students’ own comments about their laptop experiences by following the links below.
Reading Online, www.readingonline.org
Posted February 2002
© 2002 International Reading Association, Inc. ISSN 1096-1232