10 Important Rules For Your School’s Computer Lab

We love education technology here . From the looks of it, you like it too. So let’s stop for a second and forget the idea of a 1:1 classroom or a BYOD setup. Let’s take a walk down the hall together and stop in at the school computer lab. It’s filled with brand new barely working computers. They are there for a reason: to help students access the web and learn together. Computer labs can be a hotbed of activity or they can be something that resembles a graveyard. It’s up to your school to determine which you want.
Every school is different so these rules are not perfect for everyone. However, at least some of them are quite useful. For example, ‘print only when necessary’ is a great tip that is eco-friendly and saves your school a bit of coin on printing costs.
On the other hand, ‘work quietly’ may not suit every school’s computer lab. As I mentioned above, these are labs, not libraries. It can be okay to do group work or to have some collaborative project-based learning in the lab. Again (can’t stress this enough), it’s up to every individual school to determine the proper rules for a classroom / school computer lab.
The following list of 10 rules are succinct and meant to be printed out and posted on your lab’s walls. They may not have much description to go along with each rule, but it’s a great starting point.

Personally, I think the ‘surf safely’ rule is most important. Honestly, it’s more important than working quietly or (heaven forbid!) not changing settings on a computer. Most of the technical stuff can be accomplished using preventive software or parental controls (like on an iPad). But the ‘surf safely’ (shouldn’t it be ‘safely surf?’) rule is key because it brings to mind the idea of digital citizenship. To give you a quick idea of what I mean, digital citizenship means you should be aware that your information is public, everything you do online is public, and that you will be held accountable for any action you take. Simple as that.
Hopefully we can all remember that and these other rules (except for the food and drink one – I typically find myself eating at my desk) when we sit down in a computer lab. Happy surfing!