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I’m now done with the first two weeks at Lillehammer Videregående Skole, and I thought I’d write a bit about the use of laptops there.

The classrooms have recently been equiped for the use of laptops. Every classroom’s got speakers mounted above the blackboard and a video projector mounted from the ceiling. All this is connected to a Dell docking station at the teacher’s desk (Dell because the school made a nice discount deal with Dell, and so the majority of the students have bought their laptops from them). In addition every classroom has a wireless access point.

We haven’t started using the laptops yet as the Dell laptops haven’t arrived, but I’ve been using the tablet for my homework. For that I’m mainly using Microsoft Office OneNote 2003 (it came bundled with the computer). I’ve created a “School” folder with sections for every subject, and I think I’m going to create pages there from every lesson. I’ll write the notes from the lesson on that page, and also write down things I have to remember like homework, hand-ins etc. I’ll then set note flags so I can easily find it later:

I can then have OneNote search through all the notes and find note flags I haven’t yet marked as complete. This way I can find homework/hand-ins I have yet to do with the click of a button:

The school’s using a so-called “digital learning platform” (blah, blah) called Fronter, where copies of everything we’ve been handed out is kept, and where we can upload hand-ins etc. Instead of having to keep track of period plans and stuff like that we’ve been handed out, I simply download a copy of it from Fronter, open it in Word and print it to a virtual printer called “Send to OneNote 2003″. As you’ve probably guessed, it stores the documents as images in OneNote, where I later can annotate them etc.:

As for how the use of laptops in the lessons is going to work out, we’ll see when the Dell laptops arrive. What I’ve heard this far though, is that we’re going to get licenses for various software to use, like English and German dictionaries, MathCad, MathType, etc.

Certainly going to be some interesting weeks ahead.