Student Laptop Initiative
Stephen Farley, Head of Upper School and Director of Studies

December 2003

As we prepare for the arrival of a new Upper School Academic Center and the implementation of a student laptop program in the fall, I have returned frequently to the idea of "computers as mindtools," a concept I encountered in the fall of 2002 during my participation in the Distance Learning Project at Teachers College, Columbia University. As David H. Jonassen, the originator of the term and author of the book Computers as Mindtools for Schools (Prentice Hall, 2000), explains, "Mindtool… are computer applications that require students to think in meaningful ways in order to use the application to represent what they know. …Students cannot use Mindtools without thinking deeply about the content they are learning, and, if they choose to use these tools to help them learn, the tools will facilitate the learning and meaning-making process."

Laptops are useful tools for our community because they support our school mission: assisting students in the development of competence, independence and self-awareness by meaningfully engaging and investing them in the learning process. Instruction in the Upper School is rife with examples of students using technology in this manner already. In science classes, students use computers to access sample problems on a course website and to conduct virtual experiments too costly, cumbersome or time consuming to set up in the "real world." In English classes, instructors are using the internet to conduct classes, writing workshops and provide office hours throughout the day and well into the evening. In our history classes, students are traveling the world in search of authentic artifacts and primary documents. In our foreign language classes, students are conducting "net meetings" by communicating entirely in a language other than English. In our math classes, students are able to graph functions, manipulate objects and explore equations with an unprecedented ease and clarity.

In every instance, our laptop program is not about the machines, but about what these machines allow our teachers and our students to accomplish by working together. The excitement of using computers as Mindtools is that this approach improves student interaction with peers and instructors, encourages students to take responsibility for their own learning, and increases opportunity for feedback and reflection. A school where students learn with laptops is a school where students truly "know themselves."

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