Tips for Computer Lab Management

Monopoly 4 Teachers

Go directly to the Computer Lab.  Do not pass go. Do not collect $200.

Teachers often are afraid to take their class to the computer lab because it  seems chaotic.   Classroom management in a computer lab is completely different than it is in a regular classroom.  It’s especially scary if you are not personally comfortable with computers.  What will you do if something doesn’t work?

I consider myself technologically literate, but I learned the hard way that being a computer literate USER doesn’t necessarily translate to being a great computer literacy INSTRUCTOR.  So, for those of you who have been putting off taking your students to the computer lab, I thought I would share some of my hard-learned tips here.  The two biggest challenges are helping students who lack computer skills and monitoring improper usage.

Need for Hand-Holding

Students need a different kind of support to help them with computer-based activities than they do with paper/pencil tasks.  This is especially true if your students aren’t computer literate or the community is on the wrong side of the digital divide.  They need a lot of hand-holding because they are afraid of  doing it wrong.  You’re faced with all these kids saying “my computer doesn’t work” and “I don’t know what to do” and the next thing you know you’re running around in a frenzy trying to help them all one by one.  And it’s not just a few students who want your help.  A 2003 survey of incoming Colorado State University  students found 52% of students prefer to learn new technologies in a one-to-one situation (only 28% prefer a class).  And to make it worse, those students who are waiting for you will quickly become helpless, so that they can do what they want to do on the computers, saying “I kept calling and you didn’t come to help me.”

Leads to Off Task Behavior

Students who are stuck, or those who see an opportunity while your back is turned, would rather check personal e-mail, play games or watch NBA video highlights than do the assigned work.  Kids who don’t have regular computer access find it really difficult to avoid these forbidden things once they finally have some screen time.

This is hardly surprising.  Think about it –what’s the first thing you do when you sit down to the computer?   I bet it’s similar to one of the things on the student off-task list above.  The pre-teen and teen years are all about social connections, so why are we surprised/frustrated that that’s the way students want to use computers?  Good teachers are proactive about solving these two main problems:

Lab Management Tips

• bring your own lab rules poster and review it
• provide clear step by step directions to EACH student
• SOS signal — create an indicator to sit on top of monitor to indicate student’s need for computer help
• learn (and perhaps teach) some easy “broken computer” troubleshooting
• group students with least comfortable nearest you and put the most computer literate at the ends of rows or every 5 students or so
• do a small group training of your most technologically literate students the day before so they can act as teaching assistants
• allow play time at the end (if you stay on task for X minutes, you can earn Y minutes of computer free time)

I’ll update links to each of these posts in the series as they are written.

Do you have management tips to add?