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This morning started with a session on student computer use in the classroom. They looked at tablets and laptop use by students at the Univ. or Vermont School of Business where they REQUIRE TABLETS of all their students – undergrad and grad. Their faculty struggle with needing the students to have computers in the class with the fact that computers are now fully-functional entertainment centers (sound familiar?) They revamped the class to use the tablets and installed activity monitoring software on the computers to track what the students ‘really’ do in class. They found that 20% of the time students were not doing class-related activities. The found that tablet users did less instant messaging but more gaming, email, web surfing than the laptop users. They also found that the more time a student spent instant messaging the worse grade they got in the class (shocking!). They also found that 50% of web browsing done in a class is unproductive. They also found that to some degree the tablet students did better on the course final grade. There are still some questions to be answered, but an interesting empirical look at classroom computer use.
1 Comment on ‘Educause SE Wed. AM’
I always think these stats are really interesting! While I agree that to a large extent, much of the computer use in classroom is not focused on academics, I worry when some people outright say “no laptops in class!” If 50% of web browsing was unproductive, another 50% was productive (perhaps reinforcing points made in class). If 20% of the time the students are doing non-class related activities, 80% of the time they are focused on class activities. I hate to cut off that 50% useful browsing and 80% useful computer activity because sometimes students aren’t paying attention. Really, I’m just rambling. I’ve been thinking a lot about this in the past few days. Thanks for the post!