These are my rough notes about what I might say about using laptops to facilitate online discussion among students.  I will polish this up before our presentation, obviously!

I have asked students in my class to use online writing spaces, such as the Discussion Board feature of Blackboard and publicly hosted blogs they created for my class, at three times:

• before class (as homework - to respond to readings, for example)

• during class (I ask them to pull up the discussion board, for example, and engage in an "electronic discussion" while in class.  We also have oral discussions and compare the two.  Each has its merits, and we recognize that; having access to both gives us the best of both worlds)

• after class (Sometimes we are not able to finish a discussion or activity to our satisfaction in class - I ask students to use the discussion board or blogs to continue what we started).

Being able to have students jump onto the online writing spaces for the class during class time has become invaluable for me.  Sometimes I do not realize how exciting and interesting the homework they do will be, and I want the entire class to get the benefit of reading and responding to it.  While I would be able to assign that as homework, I often want a networked discussion first in order to help students get exposed to all of the ideas in everyone's home work before jumping into an oral discussion or into my lecture. 

Shy students: some of my students are reluctant (for any number of reasons, including cultural and gender-based) to speak up in free-flowing class discussion.  When we have in-class online discussions, these students readily "type up."  Two things happen: we learn from their comments (they may share interesting ideas or pose questions that I can take up in front of the whole class), and other students read their posts out loud.  When a student who is more confortable speaking chooses to read aloud the post of a more shy student, that student has a toe hold in the oral discussion segment of the class and can more confidently add to the comments s/he already made.

The real benefit is the seamlessness of the discussion and the training it provides the students.  In other words, sometimes students see the daily written homework as busy work, but when their own words can be integrated into class time meaningfully, they tend to put a lot more intellectual energy into their homework (and when it can be broadcast to the class via ClassSpot as well . . .but I will leave that discussion to Kelly : )