Phones and tablets and especially laptops are essential tools for navigating modernity. Instead of being banned, they should be baked into the learning experience using toolbelt theory, workflow thinking, differentiated instruction, and Universal Design for Learning.

Toolbelt Theory is based in the concept that students must learn to assemble their own readily available collection of life solutions. They must learn to choose and use these solutions appropriately, based in the task to be performed, the environment in which they find themselves, their skills and capabilities at that time, and the ever-changing universe of high and low-tech solutions and supports.

A Toolbelt for a Lifetime

Tools matter though. They are the most basic thing about being human.

They matter most for those who lack the highest capabilities.

And everyone needs a properly equipped Toolbelt to get through life.

Toolbelt Theory for Everyone

Students graduate without a toolbelt. They don’t have their own research databases covering their interests and semiotic domains. They don’t have workflows. They could have been building those the whole time.

This is the mark you must aim for as a researcher, to not only have enough material - and to know where the rest of what you haven’t read will be located - on hand to do your work. You must build a library and an anti-library now… before you have an emergency presentation or a shot at a popular guest post.

The 5-Step Research Method I Used For Tim Ferriss, Robert Greene, and Tucker Max

We all have different needs and different toolbelts. Help co-create personalized toolbelts to meet learners’ needs. Provide learners real laptops with real capabilities, and fill those laptops with assistive tech and tools of the trades. Help learners develop personalized workflows to last a lifetime.

In this way, we want to emphasize that workflow thinking can be a personal reevaluation of the capital-minded, deskilling focus of workflows in industry or business contexts.

A lens of workflow thinking pushes against this, instead asking “What are the component pieces of this work?,” “How is this mediated?,” and “What might a shift in mediation or technology afford me in completing this?” In short, we see workflow thinking as a way to reclaim agency and push against institutionally purchased software defaults.

We also offer workflow mapping as a complement to workflow thinking. Where workflow thinking imagines new composing possibilities, workflow mapping instead looks backward, asking how practices and preferences accrete over time.

Workflows, however, aren’t about tools used in isolation or in perfect test conditions. Rather, a workflow is a habituated, mediated, and personal means of accomplishing something.

Writing Workflows | Chapter 1

How do we support scholarly agency and autonomy when devices are banned?

And how do we avoid throwing neurodivergent and disabled people under the bus when devices are banned?

When laptop-ban arguments are broken down, what you find is mistrust of students and a sense of insecurity on the part of professors. And the studies that support the bans are shaky at best. Worst of all, laptop bans harm—really harm—disabled students, who make up a large part of the U.S. student population. Mistrust of students and shaky studies are not a good enough reason to hurt disabled students.

When You Talk About Banning Laptops, You Throw Disabled Students Under the Bus | HuffPost Contributor

This is our chance to build real Universal Design for Learning around the greatest information, communication, and collaboration tools humans have ever developed.

The issue here is that laptops in the classroom represent the first real chance at Universal Design for Learning – the first real chance to allow every student to choose the media format most appropriate for their own needs – the first real chance for students who are different to be accommodated without labels, and I’ll be damned if I’m willing to give that up for the vanity of a few faculty who cannot figure out how to teach with the greatest information and communication tool humans have ever developed.

SpeEdChange: Humiliation and the Modern Professor