Having seen how students are using laptops at university now, here's my view;
- speed of starting from power on is more important than raw power
- using a small device makes it much easier to use in class - consider using with larger monitor, keyboard and mouse back in the halls of residence
- find out about any specific software used on the course - for example, our students can get a fee 3D CAD licence for a year which is very useful, BUT, the software does not work with MACs and there are fairly stiff minimum requirements
- as mentioned above, the more well built, the better.
- battery life is important, as even if a power socket is available, people tripping over trailing leads cause a lot of damage to laptops in class
- while there are special deals on microsoft software, using other software may offer better protection against plagiarism - sadly, we see far too much of this. Password protected screensavers are also useful in this regard.
- rucksack is a good plan. I don't think I've seen a student carrying an obviously "laptop" bag, and one would stand out like a dog at a cat show.
- beginning to use the referencing / bibliography tools in the word processing software from day one is a good plan. One area where I consistently find mself using the red pen is when students either don't reference a source, or do it so badly that you couldn't identify the source if you tried. Getting this right from day one will pay for itself again and again in terms of the marks obtained. While I could rant on about referencing junk like wikipedia, I won't....
- Check to see how the department will accept work. As an example, we accept work on USB stick, and on CD, as well as a hard copy. The electronic copy allows us to use tools like turn it in to check for plagiarism. For CAD work, the electronic model allows us to track the build of the model (and which student number was logged in at the computer!).
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