Ollie+persuasive+writing

‘Laptops are the way forward for education,’ says Ms Moore, ‘They have transformed the teaching in my classroom,’ says Mr Tarr; ‘Every job in the future will use computers’ says Mr Jones. These teachers, without a doubt, know what they are talking about. It is blatantly obvious they do, but it’s not just these teachers who love laptops. 87% of teachers, who took part in a recent survey, stated, ‘that they believe quality of work has increased with the aid of laptops’. Would 87% of teachers lie? It is also becoming clear that computers will be heavily involved in future jobs. So laptops are a perfect tool for education and they are an ideal instrument to build the foundation for future life. It has been argued that laptops are ridiculously expensive and cost //too// much to maintain, but this simply is not true. It may be true that laptops themselves are on the pricey side, about 1000€ to be precise (when purchased in bulk). It is understandable that some teacher may appose laptops because of the price. But laptops, in the long run, can actually save money! (That wasn’t a typo be the way). This is due to the fact that the school will use fewer workbooks, less paper and smaller quantity of textbooks than other non-laptops schools. There was a recent survey held in America, it revealed that 53% of teachers surveyed (about 1500 were involved in the survey) would prefer their students to use textbooks on laptops instead of paper textbooks. Many people may argue that 53% isn’t that much, but it is over 750 teachers. 750 people who teacher for a living, I imagine they know what is best for their student. What is amazing about this result is that 5 years ago teachers would never dream of using ‘e-books’ for teaches, but in 5 short years they have persuaded 53% of teachers that they are the way forward, in the next 5 years they may have persuaded 100% of teachers! Of course there is no getting away from the fact that laptops are expensive. But they do have many positive aspects, for example: In San Francisco the Rockmen Institute held a three year study on students with laptops and students with out. At the end of the study all the students took a written test to analyse their progress. The results clearly showed that students with laptops outperformed non-laptop students on many different parts of the test. Out of all the teachers who took part, 4 in 5 have since introduced laptops into their classrooms; evidently they value the students’ education over the price of laptops. A survey held in 2008 revealed that laptops increase the productivity of students and the quality of their work. In the same study, eighty-seven per cent of the teachers have agreed that the quality of work has increased when the pupils use laptops. They also commented on how students are more willing to redraft and edit their work. They also stated that they believe the work produced looks more professional than work produced using ‘conventional’ pens and paper. This could be due to the many features that the Word Processor possesses, for example it has a spell-check built into it, and this means the students avoids unnecessary spelling and grammatical errors. As well as improving the quality of work, seventy one percent of teachers believe that students are more interested in their work; as a result, they believe that they are putting more effort into it and as a result of that, students, in general, achieve higher marks than those with out the aid of laptops. If a student suffers from back pains, then this could be due to him/her carrying around very heavy books. This could be avoided if they just carry a light laptop, which can easily account for several work books and even text books. The BBC estimate that the average weight of a school bag is around 9.3 kg, on the other hand, the weight of a Lenovo T-61 (IST laptops) is only about 2kg. This laptop can account for numerous work books and many text books. The memory of this laptop is the equivalent of about 1,750,000 A4 sheets of paper. Just try and carry that much around in your bag! For 2kg worth of standard work books, that would give you about 300 pages (at most). ‘Losing your laptop means losing all your hard work.’ Wrong. This statement is ridiculous and would probably have come from someone with no experience of laptops and therefore they shouldn’t have this opinion in the first place. I believe this is one of the main reasons why people are against laptops. This narrow minded opinion could be holding back a students education. It could make the difference between an A and an A*, their IB results and even the difference between a 2-1 and a 1st at university. By not supplying a child with a laptop, teachers could be damaging their future education as they may not achieve as much at school and as a result not achieve as much at in later life. Back to the subject of losing work. As pointed out before, this statement is completely wrong. Of course losing a laptop will mean losing the work on it, but it would be the same for losing a work book. But the work on a laptop can easily be ‘backed up’ on to another computer, meaning that losing work stored electronically is not much harder than losing work in books. In comparison, losing work written in books is now child play compared to losing backed up work! If a laptop is lost, the backed up work can be easily retrieved while it would probably have to be re-written if it were in a standard work book, thus saving time for the student. It has been mentioned in previous paragraphs that laptops are a great tool for education, I agree with this statement, 87% of teaches agree with this statement but more importantly students agree with this statement. During the Rockman study, student most strongly agreed with the statement, ‘computers help me improve my school work.’ At the end of the day that are the ones using the laptops. There is one final statement I want to end on, the statement that laptops increase independence. This is true because students can now research topics more instead of simply relying on the teacher. Independence is likely to result in a successful life and is vital in higher education such as university. Yet another good point for laptops! If you only remember one point about this article remember this, – Laptops aren’t simply an aid to future learning; they are the future of education itself.
 * __ Laptops – Save, not delete __**