Multitasking

Funnily enough, as I sit down to write this post tonight, I'm on Facebook chatting with my sister, I'm texting, and I'm listening to music....and writing.  Multitasking is something I'm really used to, especially in the classroom.  I'm answering a question from one student, getting an X-Acto knife for another student, and taking attendance all at the same time.  I have learned to do many things at once, with pretty good accuracy.  Since this is something I know I'm good at, I generally expect it of my students as well.  I normally don't mind if students are listening to music or even texting from time to time.  What surprised me about the Rosen text was the study from Instant messaging affects academic reading time, but not test performance, which suggests that test takers who were interrupted by IMs did just as well as students who working uninterrupted.  I was surprised because I prematurely assumed that multitasking causes students to do a lesser job on tasks, so this study was definitely enlightening.  In the past, I have done projects using phones in the classroom, and I have even done a few polls (polleverywhere.com) in which students can vote on things for me via text, but this chapter has inspired me to take that a bit further.  It might be interesting to have some prompts about art/artists and have a "race" to  see who can find the answer fastest.