There’s evidence that students do better in class when they use a pen and paper instead of a laptop to take notes. But there’s reason to suspect that those differences in student outcomes are less about which tech they use than about how they take notes with each type of tech.

Given those possibilities, and in the interest of creating an inclusive classroom environment that accommodates students’ diverse learning needs, I don’t ban laptops in class. Instead, I focus on teaching my students to use tech effectively. I do that, in part, by giving students note outlines that match the slides for each of my classes. Students can print out the outlines or download them and fill them in digitally. Almost all my students use laptops, but the outlines keep them on task (and off Instagram).

To give you a sense of what this looks like in my classes, here’s the full set of slides for my class on the sociological imagination. And here are the notes slides I give students for that class.