The Money Question

If you google "classroom design" or "classroom decor" you'll see interesting things that teachers do with their classroom spaces.  A number of teachers in my district are really trying to change their spaces.  The question that comes into my mind is, "Who paid for all of this?" 

Some teachers have sofas, shelving, lighting, professional artwork, coffee tables, easy chairs, rocking chairs, carpet, window treatments, wall paper, pillows, room dividers, book racks, etc.  These kinds of things, 95% of the time are paid for out of teachers' pockets.  Sometimes they are donated, and sometimes, they are paid for by school funds. 

I have a friend who has put over a couple of grand into her classroom over the last couple of years, and that does not included books or regular teaching supplies.  All of it was self funded.  Some teachers I know submit their receipts to the office and get some of their money back.  Do other professions pay for the materials and tools they use on their work site?  Don't get me wrong; I don't pay for everything, but I do pay for things that might surprise people: almost all of my classroom library books (some were donated),  storage bins, labels, professional books, all of my games and puzzles, spare notebooks, my pet supplies, Mothers and Fathers Day gifts my students give to their parents, spare gym clothes for kids, special resources or materials when the supplied ones don't do the job adequately (especially when you have a variety of ability levels in your class), etc.  And that does not include the money I spent on my design project. 
When it comes to paying for things in terms of classroom design, I'm not sure what to think because there are so many factors: 

• Like teaching, classroom design is highly individualistic.  One classroom design might work for one teacher, but it may not work for another.  I know that when I have TOCs/supply teachers/substitutes in my classroom, some of them like my format and others are absolutely bewildered, ("Where do the students sit? ... On those?!  Where do they put their things? ... You're kidding me! etc.). 
• If the school pays for all of the things that I put toward design, then those things, in all fairness, belong to the school.  It is the same if I buy materials for my classroom through school funds, then I will leave those resources behind if I ever switch schools.  But on the other hand, if some teacher decides say to decorate their classroom in a gorilla theme, do we really want them to leave behind their rainforest backdrops, vines and banana trees?  Apart from the storage issues alone, how practical is it for schools to hang on to these things?
• Because schools do pay for classroom furniture, they tend to buy many of the same items.  This makes short term economic sense because of the discounts afforded by buying in bulk.  But it does not make great educational sense because schools tend to buy furniture that perpetuates the antiquated factory-model of education (sit down, shut up, and do your work).  It is akin to making expensive repairs or keeping up the maintenance on your horse and buggy, even though a bicycle or car would do the job better. 
• Ideally, the school and the teacher would mutually agree on what the teacher would need for his or her classroom, and then say the district would coordinate the purchase so that if teachers in multiple schools wanted the same things, then they could take advantage of bulk purchasing. 
• In the UK and Australia, they have had this massive project called BSF or Building Schools for the Future.  It was a national program where they invested in schools by creating sound educational environments within existing schools or even building new schools.  The chances of this happening in my area are probably slim to none, but it's nice to see what other jurisdictions are doing. 

I guess the best I can hope for is the "slush fund" model.  Schools, through parent fund-raising or other sources, give each teacher a pool of discretionary funds (I have received between $100 and $200), and it truly is discretionary: do what you think you need to do with this money.  Use it for your classroom guilt free.  Oddly though, I don't think I've ever submitted a single receipt for anything related to classroom design.  Until this moment, I think that because it was my pet project, I've used my discretionary funds for other classroom materials.  That might change.

"Travel" Books: Books I Took on My (Classroom Design) Journey

Whenever I go on a trip, I take along some books to read while I go.  On the negative side, sometimes the books are better than parts of the trip (sleeplessness in a strange bed, travel delays, etc.).  On the positive side, sometimes the books are an excellent companion for the journey, and later when I think of the trip I had, the trip seems inextricable from the book. 

Metaphorically, my design journey has had several books come along for the ride.  I thought I would share some of them here.  What I write about these books is my take on them, which is heavily biased and incredibly inaccurate.  I put words in the authors' mouths because I write mostly from memory.  If I use a phrase the author never used in the book (or never would use), then it is mine.

In Pursuit of Elegance: Why the Best Ideas Have Something Missing by Matthew May
I liked this book but I found it uneven.  It basically starts with one premise: that great ideas or designs are flexible and are open to possibilities not necessarily intended by the creators.  The reason I found it uneven is because the bulk of book is May giving examples to support his thesis.  Some of the examples I found fascinating, but others left me cold and felt a little forced.  You'll have to decide which ones speak to you.  But overall, I loved the premise of the book.  I thought my risers fit this idea of elegance: flexible, adaptable, design transcends even its intent, etc.  (just like the Stratocaster?)
 
Where Good Ideas Come From by Steven Johnson
I have the same criticism of this book as I do for the one above.  It has basically one thesis and then a series of examples to support that thesis.  The main thesis is that good ideas have to fit within the "adjacent possible" which means that in order for new ideas to be adopted, they have to be close to something that already exists or at least something that is cognitively acceptable.  Johnson says that some ideas do not catch on because they are too far our or ahead of their time.  Ideas have to be acceptable and accessible.   In terms of my design journey, I thought it paralleled the process of my journey.  If you read through my blog, the progress of my journey was a series of connected events, not merely inspiration from left field.  If you haven't read this blog before my journey goes something like this:

1. Was given a teaching partner unexpectedly
2. Given an ugly, storage space to keep my belonging
3. Created a zen lounge as a joke
4. Teachers loved it and used it when I wasn't there
5. Could I duplicate this for students?
6. Saw banks of seats during a family museum trip
7. Built emulations of these seats
8. Kids loved them for their agility
9. Continued to try to de-institutionalize my classroom environment
10. Have had visitors from other schools, districts, provinces, and now other countries (Thanks Mary and Karen!) come by for a look see. 

So you can see that my journey was a connected evolution of events, just as Johnson describes in the examples in his book.
Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything by Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams
This book is like Levitt and Dubner's Freakonomics, but centres on the power of collaboration. The authors make a compelling argument by showing how things like Wikipedia and YouTube have revolutionized the way people get and share information. Not only does the audience select what information is retrieved (instead of an editor or a network deciding what is shown when), but it is also the same audience who contributes to creating and posting the content. For free. Sure there were clubs and newsgroups 20 years ago, but the amount of information that people upload out of the goodness of their hearts is astounding. Tapscott and Williams explain why people contribute and why it is mutually beneficial for contributor and audience. I guess I'm not as altruistic as I thought when I started sharing this design blog because the feedback I have received from strangers and colleagues has been incredibly useful for shaping my design journey. It has been as beneficial as the books I profile here.
The key to allowing collaboration interestingly is a parallel to the Elegance book above: leave things out so that you have flexibility for your idea to evolve as more people contribute. Open architecture provides possibilities for expansion and growth, so create a framework, not a closed structure, not a finished idea.


Made to Stick by Chip Heath and Dan Heath (Weren't these the names of 2/4s of My Three Sons?)
Hmmm. Another orange business book.  This book takes Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point (I liked that book too, but everyone has read it, so I won't talk about it here), and expounds on one aspect that makes trends catch on: stickiness.  One thing I like about this book is that it actually tries to APPLY its ideas.  For example it will show an ad or some copy for a release and will go through it showing why it might not stick in people's minds.  Then it will rewrite the text as if the authors had applied stickiness enhancers (again, my term) such as using the unexpected or appealing to people's emotions.  I don't use this book in design, as much as I use it to help ideas stick in my students' heads. 

Flow by Mikhail Csikszentmihalyi
I really enjoyed this book (and I love the author's name.  It would look great on the back of a jersey.  If you had really broad shoulders).  It actually isn't a new concept, but it does explain why traditional teaching does not resonate with modern students.  In order to engage students, we need to tap into their sense of Flow.  Kids will memorize multi-syllabic names of dinosaurs, spend hours repeating a single skateboard move, and go to the end of complex and challenging role-playing video game.  Why is it they can do these things when those same kids forget how to spell "what", won't do their homework for even ten minutes, and give up on a math problem after looking at it for thirty seconds?  It is because none of these latter tasks appeal to their reality, what is important to them, their sense of self, or to their "flow."  We've all been there: in the zone, in the groove, using our mojo, or whatever term strikes your fancy.  When we are in that flow, nothing can stop us and even better, we never want to stop.  Flow is the same way.

Learning Journeys by James Clarke
My favourite book on classroom design (tied with The Third Teacher) actually isn't a book at all but more like a booklet.   I came across it last year when I was googling for different classroom design concepts and I came across the pdf online (that's when I found Isis's cool StepSeat).  Someone recently sent me a hard copy of Learning Journeys.  I don't know if it is holding onto the hard copy or having a few years of my journey under my belt, but I found that the concepts discussed in the book really resonated with me even more.  If you are thinking of investigating classroom design or starting a classroom design learning team, I think that this document would be a great place to start the wheels turning and initiating discussions.  I would love to have a bunch of copies of this book to start a teachers research group on classroom design.  You can still download the pdf at http://www.isisconcepts.co.uk/contact/information/reports.html .

If you have any books you can recommend that would help me on my classroom design journey, please let me know.  As you can see they don't necessarily have to do with education or design, but maybe just be about ideas.

Classic Rock and the Future of Education (and Design)

Buddy Holly, Jimi Hendrix, and the Edge.  When you hear those names, of course you think ... EDUCATION?!

Let me back up a little.  I've always liked looking at things and seeing how their design affected the way they worked.  As a kid, I was known for taking things apart (and getting maybe 1% of them back together).  As I got older, I also marvelled at the beauty of simple things. 

Design Is Everything

The yo-yo is incredible in its design: a piece of string, an axle, and the semi-circular weights.  You can do so many things with a yo-yo despite its simple design, and it is adjustable by releasing the tension on the string around the axle. 

Another favourite design is Snackin Cake.  Remember it?  It was around in the late 70s.  We moved into our new house, and my job was to wait in the house while my dad and his friends went back for another load.  I was unpacking some kitchen boxes and found a box of Snackin Cake.  All you had to do was put the contents in the little tray that was inside the box (no pan required!), add 3/4 cup of water, stir, and bake it at 350 degrees for 35 minutes.  I think I eyeballed the water (no measuring cup), and stirred it with my finger (extra flavour).  It was the first thing ever cooked in that house.  When my dad's friends came back in the house, they smelled the spice walnut cake baking in the oven.  I think they were blown away that I had done it in the time they had been away.  (My dad just shook his head).  We ate the cake when we unloaded the next load.  But what a great design!  You had all of the things you needed to create a tasty little snack.  Snackin Cake!  Better than Jiffy Pop popcorn which was cool to watch but hot to hold.  Better than Variety Pack cereal (you know the little packs of cereal you give kids when you go camping) which like Snackin Cake had its own built in container, but was prone to leaks.

My Favourite Design

But when it comes to perfect design, (I know, hard to beat Snackin Cake), my favourite of all time is the Fender Stratocaster electric guitar.

 

This guitar was designed for its time, but at the same time was way ahead of its time.  It was introduced in 1954.  This is the year Marilyn Monroe married Joe Dimaggio, Nixon was Eisenhower's veep, and Godzilla premiered in Japan.  Cars were starting to get big wings on the back.  How this beautiful guitar came to be designed by a non-guitar playing radio technician named Leo Fender could have been divine inspiration.  

Here are some of my favourite design elements of the Stratocaster (from tail to tip).

The part where the cord plugs into the guitar is angled to the back.  That way when you play standing up, the cord is out of the way of your strumming hand and can be wrapped back by your strap.  When you play sitting down, the cord does not get knocked by your chair or leg.  (I've snapped the jack on some bottom mounted guitars). 

from https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgvxytyN4RYHCJK9B9K7DNpKkcUbwH523lNTpa_DrYWpge3ZTc6hBUoOO40Bm8xq4Bg7AO2Ox_w_OPIhI7__S-8tGIbudrF3tiXZhDJ907HhhCCfNo_NseTq7aR5K00X7XYPQar/s320/bridge+tremolo+vintage.jpg

The tremelo or whammy bar.  It was originally designed so session guitar players could also get pedal steel effects and make double their fee.  (Did I mention the Strat was designed as a country-western guitar!)  In a brilliant, all in one design, you can set each string's height and intonation, and bend the strings up and down (like Hendrix's dive-bombs on "Star Spangled Banner.") 

The pickguard with all of the electronics mounted to it was probably the most brilliant piece of design.  This design afforded the user to change, fix and remount any of the electronics easily.  All of the wires are tucked underneath, so there is room for error.  Try changing something where the pickups are mounted to the body and the wires run through a little tunnel drilled into the guitar. 

The pickup selector (the sliding lever at the top of this picture) had 3 positions originally, one position per pickup.  But then guitarists realized that by sticking the lever in between positions, they could get a cool combination sound.  If you combine the middle pickup with the one on the left, you get a Stevie Ray Vaughan sound.  If you combine the middle with the one on the right, you get an early Dire Straits or U2's "Where the Streets Have No Name" sound.  The Stratocaster is so versatile: (besides the aforementioned guitarists) Buddy Holly, Deep Purple, Jeff Beck, Bonnie Raitt, John Mayer, John Frusciante of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, and David Gilmour of Pink Floyd (and countless others) have all played a Stratocaster as their signature sound, yet all of those sounds are so different from each other. 

There are even more design features that I love about the Stratocaster: the contoured comfortable body, the tuners all being on the same side so you don't have to figure out which way to turn them, the angled headstock so the strings run straight up the bridge so the guitar stays in tune, and the weird horns that extend on the body which make the upper notes playable on the neck while at the same time allowing the guitar to balance properly on a strap.

Leo Fender intentionally designed a guitar that played well, was easy to build, and easy to change. A vintage Strat will run you 5 digits. You can buy a new American Stratocaster for about a grand.  I bought my Mexican Stratocaster on Craigslist for $275.  I changed the tuners, swapped out the neck, put in a new pickup, drilled a hole in the pickguard so I could put in a switch to give me even more sounds, and changed the strap pins.  I think of my Strat as a hot rod I can customize and make my own. 

The Stratocaster is mythic and magical in looks, design,, and sound.  George Harrison didn't use one with the early Beatles because they were too expensive and hard to get in England at the time.  George said that if they had had Stratocasters then, the Beatles could have been really good.  I guess George will just have to settle for the success they ended up having.

Okay, That's All Nice and Everything, But Can You Get to the Education Part?

First, it might not take a lot of money to make huge gains in education.  In fact, I recommend not spending too much on any one change so that if we make some mistakes along the way, we don't feel obligated to stay the course.  If we spent ten grand for each teacher on a new SuperChalk, don't you think we'd feel pressured to use the thing in exactly the way it is supposed to be used.  And there would be no way we'd let the students even touch it.  Think of me and my cheap Strat.  Do you think I would make any of the changes I made if the thing cost me a month's pay?  (Don't forget, I make teacher's wages).  Because it is my number one guitar, I make changes I think I NEED to make, but I don't get too upset if I bodge things up.

Second, Fender's design is brilliantly customisable.  Education should be the same way.  No one thing works for every student and no one method works the same way for every teacher.  With the Stratocaster, you can get a myriad of sounds depending on who is playing it and how they choose to use it.  Education should be the same way.  With the Stratocaster, the essential parts are all the same: some strings, a neck, a body, and some hardware.  Education should be the same way.  We should have a basic framework that allows customization and individual differences.  Teaching is an art in the same way that playing the guitar is an art.  If we all taught or played the same way, the best we could ever hope to achieve is uniform mediocrity.  By having customizable freedom allowed within a flexible framework, at the very least we'd have the possibility of brilliance. 

Third, Fender was not the first guitar designer to use many of these design features, but he was definitely the first one to put them all together in such a brilliant, beautiful and elegant package.  Sometimes it is the combination of old ideas that turns into a wonderful new idea, and sometimes it is a new way of looking at a pre-existing idea that makes it useful.  Though the model of education has not really changed in centuries, maybe we need to implement some new ideas or old ideas in new ways, or even look at it from a different perspective (like from a radio technician's). 

So the lessons I learned from Leo Fender are:

• Make changes that make sense (i.e. based on need, not on financial compulsion).  Form meets function. 
• Flexibility opens up the possibilities. 
• Fresh implementation is as important as invention. 

Afterword: Bad Design Example


I was really looking forward to getting a copy of Led Zeppelin III.  I think I bought four or five copies of the record from two or three different stores and I took all of them back for a refund. 

Not only did LZIII have some great songs on it (including "Since I've Been Loving You" and some interesting acoustic songs that were the precursor to "Stairway to Heaven"), but it also had this really cool cover.  Using a tab on the side, you could spin the insert around and the little circular windows would change (kind of like a children's popup book.  Think of it as a psychedelic version of "Pat the Bunny".)  Presumably, different themes shown in the windows matched the different personalities in the band.  This gave you something to do while listening to the music (before music videos and Youtube). 

It was great in theory, but terrible in practice.  Records are made of plastic which can change shape with heat or pressure.  Every record I bought of LZIII was warped beyond playability because of the metal fastener that enabled the rotating insert.  When the records were stacked for shipping, the fastener protruded enough to bend all the LZIII records in my vicinity out of shape.  (Deform meets function?)  I eventually gave up trying to find a copy, and come to think of it, never did bother to buy it when it came out on CD.  Once bitten...

Daniel Pink and me

Where I Got to Know Daniel Pink
For the first two weeks of the summer, my daughter had swimming lessons.  Because the lessons were 45 minutes, it wasn't really long enough to go home or run a lot of errands.  Because it rained the almost the whole two weeks, it wasn't really conducive to talking to the other parents who huddled in their cars or walked around with umbrellas, nor was it good for reading.  So I downloaded random educational podcasts and listened to them while I walked around in the rain.  I came across Daniel Pink's ideas through these podcasts.

My friend Anita had always mentioned Pink before, but I guess I wasn't really ready to listen to those ideas as my head was already filled with a bunch of other ideas.  I must have emptied my brain since then because I was a little more receptive to Pink's ideas now and picked up his latest book.  Here's my take.

http://www.danpink.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/wnm.jpg

Everybody Look to the Right
In Daniel Pink's book, A Whole New Mind, he calls for a shift in thinking from the left-brained world (which is analytical and convergent) to a more holistic and creative right-brained world.  Pink says that we have painted ourselves into a corner economically with the 3 As: Automation, Asia, and Abundance.  Through technology and automation, we have basically eliminated low level labour jobs in factories and industry.  Anything that can be reduced to a linear routine can be done by a cheaper, faster, more efficient machine.  This includes assembly lines and tax preparation software.  The second A stands for Asia because jobs such as customer service call centres are outsourced to Asia.  There, the workers are happy to be paid a tenth of what a North American would make for the same job.  Because of Automation and Asia, huge amounts of jobs in North America are going to evaporate.  This problem is going to be exacerbated by the third A: Abundance.  Westerners are used to having lots.  We have more cars, phones, and TVs than we have people in most households.  We have things that we buy and never use or forgot that we even had (see: Costco and dollar stores).  Why?  Because we CAN.  Westerners have become a little flabby and spoiled because of the abundance we have, and unfortunately, we have come to expect to have lots without doing a whole lot of work.  (My take, not necessarily DP's). 

The Six Senses
Pink recommend that the way to steer the ship to avoid the iceberg is to train ourselves to think in terms of the new 6 senses:  Design (the decisions about why things are made the way they are), Story (thinking about things based on their story: their context and origin), Symphony (bringing all elements together to work as a unit), Empathy (being able to think how others might), Play (bringing joy and games into one's life), and Meaning (instead of only chasing the all-mighty buck, what is the purpose of what I am doing?). 

Pink talked about these senses mainly in terms of life and business, but I read the book with an educational lens.  I fully agree with all of the 6 senses he outlines, but I also have some criticisms.  First, the kudos.  Story, Meaning, Empathy and Symphony are resources that should be used more in classrooms.  In fact, all four of these elements work together to provide a rich learning environment.  For example, when I teach history to any grade, I use Stories to teach the events and the important concepts because it provides a context for my students.  They are able to follow the characters through the series of events and see the cause and effect nature of history.  Because the students become emotionally attached to these characters, they Empathize with them and see the events through the players in history.  Through this empathy, students can see how they might react in a similar situation.  Hopefully, through historical events, students can learn how to make their own decisions which gives Meaning to their learning.  And in using Story, Meaning, and Empathy in this way, students use Symphony by bringing all of these parts together to form a unified whole.  I think that most great lessons bring these elements of feeling, meaning, and context together, and are manifested in engagement. 

Right now, as you probably guessed, the sense I am most interested in is Design, why things are the way they are.  If you read my blog, you can see how this summer, I struggled with a good design for my lapdesks that met all of my needs.  (My friend Z, one of my 3 readers, recommended that I give the laptop design challenge to my students.  But I didn't want them to take away my fun).  I also struggle with my classroom.  I I look at my classroom and it makes me ask myself so many questions based on its design:

• What do we do here?
• What is important to us?
• How do we interrelate with each other?
• How do we learn?
• How do we feel about learning?

All of these questions and their answers have an effect on how things look and how we organize things. 

Criticisms
Ironically, Design is one of the criticisms I have of the book.  First of all, the cover of the book is orange.  This makes 3 of the business books I read this year with an orange cover.  I guess the original design intention was for it to stand out, but that is negated if the popular colour is orange.  It's like looking for a Creamsicle in a row of pylons.  (Orange is the new Pink).  And second of all, on the cover, there is a cutout of a boy's head, and when you open the cover, the boy's head turns into a man's head.  Both heads are filled with binary code and musical notes.  I get the message.  The part that bugs me is that cutout gets damaged when you slide the book out from between other books on the shelf.  I checked all 3 copies Chapters had of A Whole New Mind, and all of them had the poor boy's throat almost ripped out.  Cool design gimmick in concept, but not great in reality.  A Whole New Mind might need a whole new chin to go with it. 

The other (minor) criticism I had with the book was about education and Play.  In terms of life, Pink recommends adding more Play to one's life to foster joy and humour.  Pink sees Play as joy, leisure and humour.  As an educator, I see Play as work, as learning.  This idea is not foreign to Daniel Pink.  In his other writings, I heard him talk about managers giving workers the opportunity to play around with ideas.  When kids play, they are trying new ideas, new roles, and new possibilities.  One of the greatest scientists I ever witnessed was my daughter as a baby when she took baths.  She would see what floated and what didn't.  She would seen how many times she could fill containers with a shampoo bottle filled with water (that she knew was full when it stopped bubbling when she held it under water).  We are born with a natural capacity to try to figure out how things work, and that curiosity is shown in our play.  In my previous posts, I talked about how the Exploration Stations I set up explored this idea of learning through play.  I wished DP would have gone a little further with the idea of play, not as release, but as discovery.

My last criticism is more of a comment.  DP recommends that these 6 senses and right-brained thinking are the ways to counteract Abundance, Automation, and Asians.  Okay in terms of Abundance and Automation, maybe a whole bunch (abundance) of computers (automation) don't care and won't read his book, but I'm pretty sure that Asians are probably clued in to the game and will also adopt right-brained thinking and the 6 senses, (and will produce more things and computers to help).  So are westerners ever going to be able to level the playing field?  Maybe only if we return to a resource-based economy.  We'll always need materials to produce things.  Trades will also be important.  If we reduce our abundance, that means our toilets and sinks will have a greater chance of getting clogged because more people will be using less of them.


I really enjoyed A Whole New Mind.  So many of the ideas made sense and I want to apply more of them to my classroom.  I don't know if Daniel Pink would agree with (or care about) any of my thoughts on A Whole New Mind.  I started Drive, his earlier book on motivation.  Maybe I should take a stab at that one day too, in terms of education.

Why Have Any Desks at All?

I've talked about how I don't like all my students having desks because of the restrictive, factory-like nature of them.  In my last posts, I talked about using lapdesks and my endeavour to find or build one that fits my needs.  But I got to thinking: do I need even a lapdesk at all?

For me the answer is yes.  These are One to One schools out there that have probably negated the need for desks because all the students have laptops or tablets.  Mine isn't one of them.  Even if I had class sets of laptops, I would probably still use paper for a number of things because I like the tactile nature of the activity.  But if I had laptops, I might not need the lapdesk, just a hard surface on which to write or draw.  In some ways, the lapdesks simulate carrying around a laptop.

So if I just need a hard surface, why not use a counter, riser, table, easel or clipboard?  Why do I still need a lapdesk?  I like that students can carry a small amount of their supplies and their planners with them.  Because my students tend to work in several different places throughout the day, they need to carry the essentials with them wherever they are.  If I had just tables, I could have cups with pencils and crayon in them on each table.  But because students work on tables, counters, risers, the floor, bulletin boards, etc., keeping pencils in one spot does not work for us.   Lapdesks work for us because of the fluid, dynamic nature of our classroom.  The portability is essential given our non-sedentary, nomadic way.

I also like that the students keep their planners/schedulers/agendas with them all the time.  We probably only use them for ten minutes out of the day, but I like the message that the organizer stays with you to keep you, well, organized.  As someone who is not terribly organized and needs to be reminded of what happens when (which is why my life improved with the PalmPilot and iPod Touch), having a book or device on you is important.  Now here is a strong case of a teacher's idiosyncrasy dictating how the class runs, but that is probably unavoidable given the personal nature of teaching.  The lapdesks afford keeping the planners with my students. 

But isn't keeping a lapdesk against the idea that learning happens everywhere, (i.e. that we learn without having to rely on schooly trappings)?  Yes, it probably does.  I see the concept of organic, personalized learning as a continuum.  Though I am moving away from standardization, from desks and uniforms, from whole class novels, from lecture and test only instruction, I still do a number of things that can be seen as traditional.  I still have students raise their hands in full class lessons.  I still give whole class lessons where I am telling my students what to do and how to do things.  I still have students line up to go from room to room.  I guess I still do these things because I was raised and trained from the traditional paradigm, and so it is difficult for me to see beyond what I've always done. 

The lapdesk is perhaps one of these remnants of my traditional leanings.  But I like to think that it is at least a step in the right direction.  For me.