I remember when I was in school, the general routine was the teacher writes, writes and then writes some more, while all the students in the class copy what the teacher puts down word by word. The teacher writes the same stuff down every year, so we had around 60 odd students every year copying down things which would have been done in 5 minutes if it was being done electronically. If a student was ill and missed a class, then they had to spend a good part of the day simply copying down notes from their friend’s books, a task which is not glamourous even on a good day and downright ugly when one is recovering from an illness.

There was also the issue of getting textbooks. It was a standard problem that textbooks would not arrive on time at the start of the academic year and the first one month was spent trying to get intelligence of which shop has the text books and then rushing over in the fear that someone may buy them before you get there. Woudln’t it be more convenient and also save a hell lot of paper(and trees and therefore the environment) if the PDFs couls simply be downloaded and stored on a hard drive? Electronic storage also makes it easier to keep old notes, which may be useful in some cases…

I think laptops/computers have tremendous potential to make our educational system more efficient and hence I would support the use of laptops in class but not having internet access during class hours. If not laptop access during class, there should atleast be a drive towards getting more notes and textbooks in eelctronic format so that future generations do not waste time writing down reams of notes and then just discarding them at the end of the year.