A Yellow Tablet Surrounded by Laptops

My colleague to my right sat down and pulled out a silver HP laptop.

Then another sat across from me. "Ready for another meeting?" she said and opened up another HP laptop. A third, pulled out a chair at the long nondescript conference table, laughed at the comment and opened up her HP. Triplets. After she keyed her password, she pulled a smartphone out of her purse and placed it alongside the laptop. Multi-tasking, As I looked around, I noted there was more raw computer power in the room than all of NASA during the Apollo 11 mission. We were working on a PowerPoint presentation for the next day's inservice meeting. Apollo 11 landed Armstrong and Aldrin on the moon.

I pulled out my yellow tablet.

To be honest, I bring a laptop to meetings when I think I need to do a lot of writing, but I'd rather not. I'm a quick typist, so too often when I am in typing cruise mode the words go in the ears and out the fingers without engaging the brain. Laptop-induced notes go on for pages and pages and have been prescribed as a natural sleep aid. Afterwards, if I do look at the notes, it's as if I wasn't at the meeting at all: "We agreed to do what?"

My meeting recording device of is the Pilot G2 retractable rollerball pen (blue, not black, green or purple). I love that pen. I use it to scribble notes, record main ideas, recall people to contact, and connect disparate parts of the meeting with a shorthand of circles, arrows, stars and checks that make sense to me and mystifies my HP neighbors. Because the notes are cryptic and, ok, sometimes a little messy, I transfer them to other sheets and notes by the end of the day. That's a newspaper reporter habit: review the notes while they are still fresh. When that's done, I staple the translation to the original. Mission accomplished.

I find that handwritten notes engage the brain at a deeper level than do typed notes. The action of picking up a pen and decoding information into the hieroglyphics we call letters creates active neural pathways where learning and retention circle about. The best, most effective learning travels through active neurons, not those who have put up their toes for the night. This summer, I read that players of the Cleveland Browns were given e-tablets in training camp for play books and for film study, but those e-fads were banned from meeting rooms by first-year head coach Mike Pettine. Instead at each seat lay the old-fashioned pencil and paper. Pettine told the Wall Street Journal, "To write is to learn. When you write stuff down, you have a much higher chance of it getting imprinted on your brain"

Coaches know this. Teachers know this. Even those in my meeting of the day knew this if they gave the notion an unplugged moment of thought. That is why a best practice is to encourage and plan for notebooks and notetaking in the classroom rather than passive input through a keyboard. Technology works in many classroom activities, but note taking is not one of them. Not if the purpose of the presentation is to actually learn something. Of course in meetings, it's usually just toes up.