Implementing Electronic Lab Notebook in Organic Chemistry Lab

Technology has surely changed our ways of thinking, learning and teaching. As an educator, introducing new educational tool and teaching students how to make use of them to aid their learning are very valuable experience too.

This semester, I participated in implementing electronics lab notebook in Organic Chemistry Lab
Here is the video about Element Electronic Lab Notebook

Here are the problems we found so far -
- Registration Delay (which is very frustrating) - Free registration has to be done manually by a representative and occasionally it takes more than a week.
- Access Control Difficulty (this happens when we are trying to grade student's notebook. You won't be able to create a teacher-only area for grades since the students "own" the lab notebook.
- Pushback from students who are not tech savvy

Here are the advantages of using it in the lab-
- Cloud storage of student's data which makes group collaboration easy
- Built-in ChemDraw tool
- Availability of multimedia content blocks

I'll follow up in this topic, and talk more about how it is used in organic chemistry lab. This is going to be revolutionary of course. However it also triggered my thinking of educational tools -- what should we consider more before trying a new tool? Does it aid learning, or simply making things more complicated? Is the era of paper and pencil really over? I guess that's another topic I want to write about in another blog.