The arrival of the laptop (Apple iBook) and the wireless network at our school this year has triggered some new thinking (for me, mostly) in my classroom. My students’ writing on the internet has run in waves, with one kid picking up an idea that pretty soon half a dozen are working on.

I showed them all how to use Wikipedia to find interesting subjects to write about. I want them to learn how to read and summarize articles, and this seemed like a good idea for those who were into it. We were doing OK until today, when several people decided to copy and paste long passages straight from the web. Seeing this, the computers were put away for a bit.

This is how I see teaching as an iterative process. We made an attempt at something, summarizing informational articles. It failed a couple of key tests. Now we have to talk, again, about plagiarism, summarizing, note-taking, research, and writing in their own voice, issues I’ve been bringing to them all year.

Today, though, we are all working off the same page, from the LCD projector. We’re slogging through an article on bowhead whales and indigenous whaling, as a social studies lesson, since Alaska Native cultures is in our curriculum. It’s a paper and pencil process with one computer, for now, making lists and semantic maps, jotting down key points of interest. They can go back and turn it (I hope) into something coherent, using the computer. For now, to begin with, we need to understand basic essay writing, using the web as source material. It’s hard, though, because the reading level is difficult to control, and it isn’t always easy to find articles at a suitable level of difficulty.

I imagine that a lot of useful educational content on the internet will eventually be written by kids using social software applications, like we are doing. But they have to be shown how to do that.

When it was time to wrap up the morning work, I told them that this was a skill for the information age, and for school, that they would need to develop since school was getting more “wired” all the time. I remembered Doug Johnson’s post from yesterday, Preparing for Educational Climate Change, in which he linked to this article about $100 laptops in Africa. It included a set of pictures, beginning here.

Near bedlam was the result. Wild enthusiasm.