Should You Think Twice About Grabbing That Chromebook?

Thank you all for being so flexible and curious in our piloting of Chromebooks in the classroom this year.

I have noticed many of you -- probably the majority -- are using them for journaling and note-taking in the classroom. I am all for it, but I did want to put the link out there to the article I mentioned in class: "To Remember a Lecture Better, Take Notes by Hand."

The above article refers to a study, "The Pen Is Mightier Than the Keyboard: Advantages of Longhand Over Laptop Note Taking" from the Psychological Science journal. The conclusions, in my mind, do not rule out the possible advantages of using a laptop -- if you are aware of your own notetaking tendencies:

Prior studies have primarily focused on students’ capacity for multitasking and distraction when using laptops. The present research suggests that even when laptops are used solely to take notes, they may still be impairing learning because their use results in shallower processing. In three studies, we found that students who took notes on laptops performed worse on conceptual questions than students who took notes longhand. We show that whereas taking more notes can be beneficial, laptop note takers’ tendency to transcribe lectures verbatim rather than processing information and reframing it in their own words is detrimental to learning.

 With that in mind, keep checking in with each other and me about how the experiment is proceeding.