The styluses, of course, should be made of material that does not require chopping down trees or demand destructive mining.

With such a desk the right of the student to doodle when bored out of his mind might be seriously infringed. . . .

I'm against this because:1. If the child turns in as many as one-thousand assignments a year, that equals about eight dollars worth of paper. The touch-screen will cost twenty times that to purchase and at least that much in maintenance each year, plus the cost of a new technician for the school. A classroom vandal could cost you thousands of dollars in five minutes.

2. Many of the assignments my kids do are already printed on paper with other stuff on the back, so they're recycled.

3. Assignments are still completed at home as 'homework'. Maybe you could do tests this way, but homework is still at home, and I still get to help with it as a parent, too.

4. Assignments on paper get to be returned so the parents can see the score and help the student learn. Our schools do have websites where we can check grades, but since the schools contract the IT services, it seems that the IT companies have learned that if the site breaks more often they get to be paid more often. Very unreliable sites.

Computers are fun and useful, but I still do many things on paper as an engineer. My deliverables are still paper.

Another person pointed out that much of the "paper work" done by students is done outside of class, so the desk provides no benefit there.

My wife is an english teacher and even though almost all of her students write their papers using word processors and computers, she prefers that they hand in a printed copy so that she can grade them without having to have a computer, easily make notations, and redistribute the graded papers.

The cost of computerized desktops is prohibitive and if the only gain is saving paper, it does not seem worth it.