Does my son or daughter need a laptop?

[LarryNJ]

As a parent who has 2 kids saying "Dad I need a laptop!" I often wonder if a laptop would make them better students. I now believe every student in college needs a laptop. These days having a laptop has become as essential as pens and pencils to a child’s education. A laptop is a fast, easy and effective tool to enhance your child’s learning experience, not only will a laptop help your son or daughter with homework assignments, coursework and research but also help them stay in touch with you and the family whilst they are at university or college.


Coursework/Assignments
Word processing can help them to whiz through essay writing (great for those with untidy handwriting) and spreadsheets will assist you to set out your data clearly and concisely to help you gain top marks. Also the 'Spell Check' feature is invaluable – spelling, grammar and assignment presentation could account for 5 - 10% of marks, so running a spell check over your coursework is an easy way to get better results.

Presentations
Many courses and subjects involve presentations. Standing up in front of your class and giving a presentation is nerve-racking, but you can be confident that you have a stylish and well-presented slideshow to help you through, if you couple your laptop with a presentation software solution such as PowerPoint


Email
Email makes it easy to stay in touch with your friends and family while you’re away at college or university and is quick and inexpensive.

Internet
The biggest advantage of owning a laptop is access to the World Wide Web. It is the best research tool there is for your assignments and homework.


Research
Facts and figures are only a click away when your child uses a laptop. A wealth of knowledge is available to your child on the web and a laptop will allow them to take advantage of this when completing coursework assignments.


Storage
With a laptop you can keep all your files, music, photos and coursework in one place - and the major advantage of this is that as laptops are so lightweight and portable you can take all of this with you wherever you go. Don’t forget you can also store photos, music and movies on DVD.

If your child is in school but still lives at home you may say "we have a computer at home he can use, he doesn't need a laptop." That is true up until they start their college careers than he or she needs a laptop. There are many other places that a student can study other than their home, coffee shop, library, park ect. and the laptop is the thing that they need.

We all want our children to be successful, it's up to us a parents to give them the tools that they need to be successful. Give them the tools they need and deserve. Buy them a laptop.

[tragic]

Double-edged sword, Larry. A few random, poorly-expressed points (haven't had the second coffee, yet):

I know many high school students have laptops as basic school equipment here, meaning they have to lug it around in their backpacks. The chance of theft is high when the kids leave their packs outside shops after school (not permitted in stores). If you only have it at home, I suppose that's not a risk.

The internet is a great source of information and garbage. When it comes to schoolwork, the temptation to cut&paste rather than evaluate and critique is high. The internet can provide so much unfiltered, unchecked information, and it doesn't have to be written out again. While books are full of garbage as well, there's a lot of rubbish out there in the interwebz. However many teachers wouldn't know the wheat from the chaff, anyway.


Employers are finding that handwriting has degenerated amongst school leavers to the point that it is more illegible than usual.

One friend of mine has kids in primary school, and while they don't need laptops they have to have a PC with internet connection at home, as all homework and school assignments are obtained and submitted online (primary school!!).

Anyway, on the whole I don't think it's a bad thing. Lay down some ground rules, put every filter you can have on it, continue to help your kids with their homework, and help them evaluate the quality of the information they click on, teach them to double- and triple-check their info.

[Thequeerone]

Make sure it doesn't have an excellent sound card or video accelerator card for games

[GIGS20]

Speaking as a teacher (don't forget Larry Australian schools, they probably don't mesh perfectly with America) laptops are often an unwelcome distraction in the classroom. Students with laptops have far too many 'toys' at their fingertips and often pay scant attention to what is being presented. It really depends upon whether the school is set up to assist students in making use of the technology, because teh Digital Natives/Digital immigrants is a big steming pile IMHO many kids have no clue whatever how to research on the internet and think that a single reference from Wikipedia is the height of investigative research. (not bagging Wikipedia, more the automatic reliance on a source which has a chance of being unreliable without verifying against any other source) Nope Larry laptops are a complex addition to the educational landscape and there isn't a simple yes or no answer to it.

[laura]

You're gold Larry!

Pretty sure he means uni students not school kids.

I don't reckon school kids should have a laptops in class unless they have a learning difficulty or disability that means they can't write. Back in my day (2 years ago) we didn't have laptops in class, we didn't even have wireless internet at school, how the times have changed!!

[jono]

i didnt have a laptop at school. and i can quite easily say that if i had one i would have paid even less attention than i actually did at school.

i got mine about halfawy through my university semester and it was really helpful. there was no more fighting for the public computers in the library, and i was able to store all my files on it. so even at home i was always ablet o access the internet and complete my assignments on time.

having a laptop also reduced the domestic incidents at home when more than one person wanted to use the computer.

simple answer? make them pay for it?

[LarryNJ]

I was talking about uni/college students. Most of the younger kids aren't mature enough and I can understand gigs points about too many toys and distractions.

[.X.]

In my day, I had a computer when I came home from High School - it was a Commodore 64 with a tape drive

[BLR]

I was talking about uni/college students. Most of the younger kids aren't mature enough and I can understand gigs points about too many toys and distractions.

Uni students aren't any better, often the kids in class would be playing solitaire or other games instead of working, always having chat programs open of course. A pad and paper does the trick every time. Trust me when I say they aren't wanting a laptop for class, they want it to mess around with in their free time or to relieve boredom in class by games etc.

It's a non-essential item so is one of those things that they should buy themselves. I work full time and go to uni full time so getting money isn't too difficult.

A better option is to get them a portable hard drive for around 70 or so USD. Alot of the passport hard drives come with their own operating system and various encryption measures so as soon as you plug it into a computer it essentially converts it to your own stored desktop. They are the size of a passport so are even more portable and do the same job while cutting out the distraction of a laptop.

A few months ago I got a ASUS EEE for my travels, would be around 250 USD and is the size of a novel, weighs less then a kilo. Not the most powerful thing out there and still offers the distraction factor but at least will take your kids hardly any work to get the money, or could be a cheap and easy Christmas pressie.

[Thequeerone]

Buy yourself a laptop and let the kids haggle over computer time - works in this house

[Swee_82]

Maybe I'm getting on a bit to talk about what happening in unis now- I graduated 5(?) years ago and there wasn't any great need for a laptop then- I don't think anyone ever brought one to my classes (though admittedly, they were small classes) unless they were running obscenely late on an assignment and were still finishing it. As BLR has mentioned, as long as you have a decent portable storage device to take your work between home and uni, and it's not too hard to get use of a computer (again, in a small course it wasn't a problem, I don't know if it's worse if you're one of 10,000 arts students or something) you're fine.
At home, yep there's definately a need for the sort of stuff the article mentioned, and for mine, the biggest arguement in favour of a laptop would be if there are mulitple kids needing to use the same resource.

One more point....

Presentations
Many courses and subjects involve presentations. Standing up in front of your class and giving a presentation is nerve-racking, but you can be confident that you have a stylish and well-presented slideshow to help you through, if you couple your laptop with a presentation software solution such as PowerPoint

Utter drivel.... the expression 'death by powerpoint' exists for a reason.
Kids- don't get attached to it.

[Darren]

An A4 notepad, a few 2B pencils, an eraser, and beer money are all they need at uni...

[Skiza]

My parents kindly bought me one in year 12 because they actually wanted to use our family computer that year...it was good because i could have my laptop in my room and actually concentrate on what i was supposed to be doing, rather than having distractions.
Now that i'm at uni, its good too...like Jono said, you don't have to fight for the computers in the library and now that my bro's in year 12, we both spend a fair chunk of time researching and doing assignments so its worked out well having it.

[Jehna]

I think it depends on what you're doing at uni. For me, I cherish my laptop which yes I paid for myself. I have my whole life on there. Walking into a law class really is a scene out of legally blonde with laptops galore. For me, i justify it through the fact my exams are open book. Consequently i have to have damn good notes at the end of the semester which is much easier to achieve by being able to take down everything in class and then sort through it later and cut and paste and delete rather than rewrite everything out again. I'd also reiterate the points about fighting for computers in the library...i have more incentive to do work because i have my laptop there. Also, for law use of the internet is essential and i'm not talking about being able to look up wikipedia but pretty much all legislation, all cases, all journals etc are now available on the net and sometimes only on the net so we need access to it. Same goes for the fact that all our lectures and lecture materials are available online and everythign is very much run through online programs. Finally, as for being distracted well that's the fault of the student at hand. I'm not going to deny that there are times i play games in class and go on here or facebook....but in the end if you're at uni, you choose to be there, so study if you want to do well. If you're really not that interested you'll find ways to distract yourself with or without the laptop...if all else fails jsut go to the pub instead of class...works for most.

As for school, i went to a highschool which has a compulsory laptop policy from year 5. Totally ridiculous in my opinion. Absolutely not necessary to have your maths text book as a pdf file on your computer...in fact it frankly p*ssed me off. As long as you have a computer at home you'll get by much better and you'll appreciate the use of pen and paper when it comes to sitting your final exams and you still have a hand left after 3hrs...

[BLR]

Tell your kids to become friends with the nerdy computer class kids, the computing building has oodles and oodles of computers which they would usually have access to. I know the one semester of computing put me in good stead in regards to computers for a while.