Social sites and other attention stealers in the classroom

In our school many of the pupils have access to their own personal computers, and there is also a couple of computers in every classroom that is available for them to use. The internet access is good, and we try to use this tool as often we can to support the digital learning.

The problem is this: The pupils often get distracted from the education because it´s so easy for them to "log in" to other internet sites, especially social sites as Facebook. The pupils are faced forward in the classroom, and the computers are therfore faced the other way. This makes it difficult to get a good overwiew of what the pupils are doing on their computers. Another factor is that we have a big prosentage of pupils who need their computers to write notes during the lessons.

So, what can we do to change this trend? Should we continue using PCs in our education?

PROs

• The pupils have lots of benefits by using their computers at school. 
• They can easily write notes and have a good system by making files to each topic. 
• Access to any sort of information is unlimited.
• Sharing notes with other classmates is easy.
• Deliver assignments to the teacher is easy. 
• The difference between pupils with special needs and the rest of the class will even out. 

CONs

• A traditional classroom is not satisfying when it comes to use of PC among the pupils.
• The classroom ned to change if the teachers is going to have a good overview of the work. 
• It takes time to teach good rules aboute use of PC in the education. 
• Some pupils will allways take advantege of access to attention stealers if they exist

We can´t cut the use of computers in the education, that´s like jumping back in time. The ICT is here to stay, and we need to find a way to make it work without loosing valuble time in the education. If I look farward in time, I understand that computers and other techologies will take more space in our education. Another aspect is that my PROs-list is bigger than my CONs-list. So I think that we probably need to establish some ground rules and follow up with consequence if someone brakes these rules. Maybe a consequense can be that we confiscate the PC, or some sort of a joint punishment. What do you think?