Slashdot Mirror
Arizona School Won't Use Textbooks
Some Guy writes "A high school in Vail will become the state's first all-wireless, all-laptop public school this fall. The 350 students at the school will not have traditional textbooks. Instead, they will use electronic and online articles as part of more traditional teacher lesson plans."
Textbook sales are a racket worthy of the Gambino family.
So now, when someone says, "The dog ate my homework," they'll actually mean, "The Dog virus ate my homework!"
-Valiss
This should have started happening in schools years ago.
nuff said.
Yawn. Didn't we just have an article about kids getting criminal charges for installing software on their state provided notebooks? This ain't news anymore folks, its the trend becoming mainstream.
this is "more traditional" how?
"Staring into a computer screen is like staring into an eclipse. It's brilliant and you don't realize the damage until its too late"
All the money is being spent on "tech in schools". At the end of the day, a bad teacher will be bad given a set of textbooks or laptops. Imo, this money should go towards more teacher training/more teachers.
How many of us stare at a laptop screen for hours on end? How many of us realize how bad that is after a few days straight of doing it? LCD screens may not have the refresh rate issues, but still this can't bode well for the children's vision. Although optomitrists will likely be excited.
Just a boy doing unproffesional IT work that's way above his head.
Ruining a laptop is so much more expensive than wrecking a textbook. Plus how are you supposed to draw mustaches and balls on all the pictures for the next class to see?
Yet another step in the downward spiral of the American educational system. For God's sake, it's been proven that kids learn better from a real, material book as opposed to off computer screens.
:-|
I'm sure kids will be able to focus really well reading off screens as opposed to real books.
Now only if the entire United States High School Curriculum was similar to Arizona's big move.
We are way behind other nations and this a great move to help us catch up.
----- You know you have ego issues when you register a domain in your name.
Plans are underway to do away with all science books except for one.
This should be an interesting experiment.
I have had computers for years and I use them extensively to learn things but I have found that they are no match for good old books. Books are so much convenient to use.
I think it is unwise to completely eliminate the books from clasrooms. It would be great to augment the books with online resources. But replacing them completely seems to be a dumb move.
This textbook less classroom will begin to happen more and more once epaper finally comes to fruition. I know I would have loved to be able to download my books instead of having to buy a $200 text book for my college classes.
the next day...
Teacher: Can I see your homework?
Student: My dog ate- er, the article was a dupe, so I couldn't do it.
Teacher: groan...
First of all, the cost of such equipment would be very great, even for only 300 or so students. Secondly, a lot of students will easily be able to goof off and play games, etc. when using them.
That, and you don't have to worry about downed servers, adware, viruses, and the like in textbooks.
INACTIVE ACCOUNT
I wonder what type of laptop they will get? Where my kids go to school it is all mac.
So will students still have to pay anything then?
400 high school kids running around with laptops?
My screen is broken
My battery died
My S key won't work
I dropped it
I lost it
I lost the cables
It won't turn on
I spilled soda on it
The wireless access point is down
The network is down
My wireless card broke
I can't log in
I forgot my password
I locked myself out
I deleted all my icons
Billy deleted all my icons
What an administration nightmare. Blah. Good luck with this little project.
I live a mile away from that school, now I'll have all the wifi access I can handle.
I can see this plagued with problems. where will most of the data be stored?
1) What happens if you have internet connectivity issue before a test (night before).
2) What happens when a web link gets out dated and you cannot reference it during your studies.
3) Viruses and worms do bad things.
4) Managing the secuirty on the laptops.
5) File corruption.
Well, all the problems listed above can actually prepare a student for the real world in an office built around MS technology.
Lots of high tech 1st's coming from Arizona, ie, The University of Phoenix was one of the first schools to offer a completely 100% online degree.
I say this is a very good thing, for the students at least. First and most obviously, a ~6 pound laptop beats a ~16 pound pile of textbooks. Also, you'll notice the inherent benefits of ebooks, such as quick searching, hyperlinks to related articles, etc. Laptops are also more, um, motivating than books in that a student can conduct research that much faster and easier.
Imagin the power government will weld when they can change education text of our children on the fly to suit the preveiling views of the government.
ELOI, ELOI, LAMA SABACHTHANI!?
1) who's paying for these laptops? Taxpayers no doubt... 2) All-wireless network + destructive teen-boy hackers = disastrous combination 3) How many of these laptops do they actually expect to survive the whole school year? Kids these days run in the door and throw their bookbag up against the wall on the way to the Xbox... 4) Security? Spyware? Adware? Viruses? That's my $0.02
A year ago I would have told you that this sort of thing is far fetched and implausible. Since then I have moved to a Laptop University that is connected to several online databases and online journals. I regularily write five to ten page research papers from the comfort of my dorm room.
The future of learning is in information being availible everywhere. This school will prove it.
RTFA again for the best results.
It'd be interesting to see the cost of a laptop put up against a book. If the school could get a sponsor to supply a tablet pc, even a med/low end one (not like it need's to be able to play games) you could get a them for a relatively low price. If you can get say 8 years out of them (2 complete US highschool cycles) you're looking at a relatively low hardware cost over time. Then it's a matter of e-book licensing. I'm not sure on HS book prices, but even some of my crappy papper back books from college were well over $100 each.
Some classes this would be worth it, like advanced science, tech related classes, current soc/hist classes. When the subject matter changes so much that a textbook needs to be replaced in less the 4 years, it get's very costly.
Some not so much, literary classics don't change, and that run the school bought 20 years ago (albeit beat to hell) is probrably still in an acceptable condition.
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
cause there are some parents who are opposed to their children using this type of technology. I know how stupid this sounds, but it's true, even if on a small scale.
Top 10 things you're likely to hear shortly after the bell.
10. Canius Virii ate my homework.
9. Not now, I'm IM'ing with my broker
8. Press me and I'll press this button erasing your server
7. Road crew didn't blog their detours.
6. PDF Midterms -- Fresh off the teacher's home server, send $$ to PayPal.
5. Check out Mr. Crabapple's latest decline at RateMyTeacher.Com
4. Acrobat Reader is crashing... I couldn't bone up on it overnite.
3. Microsoft locked out PDF in favor of XML. Do you have an XML reader?
2. Not enough memstick-space
1. I can't read.
TPAA!
Textbook Publishers Association of America. Yeah, I made it up, but we simply cannot allow for progress against an old business models. Trifles innovation, hurts the authors, and leaves the suits worried.
"hey, let's replace $60 worth of books with $600 worth of fragile computer gear. I'm sure no one will drop one or anything."
"Arizona School Won't Use Textbooks"... I read, and mentally completed "because they teach evolution." The scary thing is, my imaginary headline could easily be real. USA, USA, what happened to you?
E-books are great for things that change a lot, like science, and are good for things that are amiable to hyperlinks, such as information about Shakespear.
However, when it comes to plain old literature, like Shakespear's works, paper-in-hand is a much more pleasing experience than laptop-on-lap.
Sure, have annotated, hyperlinked copies of Romeo and Juliet on the computer, but for goodness sake give those kids an actual book to read if they want one.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
they can outsource the teaching jobs to India. Imagine how much cheaper those teachers are! We finally can pay the administrators what they deserve!
Why does my '25 years in IT' brain shudder at the prospect of this? In a nanosecond the following flashed through my consciousness:
Dropped it, flat batteries, can't see it in the sun, viruses, forgot to backup, stolen, central server outage, corrupt file, server cracked, can't type that fast, wifi down, wifi overloaded, forgot my password, not enough power sockets in the room, pulled off desk by someone tripping over power cable, broken keycaps, spilled drink on it, fighting for printer time, someone took my USB memory stick, unauthorised upgrade...I'm going pale at the thought!
AT&ROFLMAO
I don't know about everyone else, but LCD or not I can't stand to read anything longer than a slashdot article (or its impending dupe!) on a screen. I have to have paper.
...approving motherboard layouts and peripheral choices and these new special school laptops will cost appox 7500 dollars.
It seems like the superintendent promoting this and many of the posts here are ignoring a fundamental problem: content. While it is nice to write about how great e-texts would be, it's not as if publishers are going to give that material away, even if it exists. So the cost of textbooks will still be there. Additionally, the answer to better education away from the textbook doesn't seem to be taking away books, which, as it turns out, can be valuable resources. The answer would seem to be giving teachers better training and forcing them to be accountable. In my experience as a teacher, the answer has never been a different avenue for transmittal of information, it has been a better transmitter.
The folks in Vail have obviously not read this slashdot article about the correlation between computer usage in the classroom and a degradation of academic performance.
Wikipedia should be somewhat useful in getting alternative views into the classroom that hadn't been covered in the past. Let's hope this weakens the anti-evolution and global warming denier crowd.
Do they teach the "theory" of creationism?
we discovered a new way to think.
First, if the laptops are $850, don't also forget to add the tech support that will be required for each laptop. Will students be able to take the laptops home? What if one gets a virus, and infects the others. What if a few students decide to destroy all the laptops. In a wireless community, that can be done. Yet, it would be impossible to burn all the books.
Add to the list of concers, that Ferenhite 451 is comming. No more books. No more written records. Students will start using only computers, and trust the content as accurate. I can see in one years curriculum "we are going to war because of weapons of mass destruction". Next year the laptop says "we went to war to liberate a people from a ruthless dictator". If the first sentance was in the book, it could not be erased, and students would ask "what? why? how did it change?".
And what about lost laptops? What is a more attractive target to steal? Laptops or books? I know on college campuses, people try and steal books, to sell them back to the bookstore for $20. Now imagine something worth 10 times as much.
This is a bad idea for so many reasons. It will raise costs per student for the school to operate. Either students will have to pay, or the property tax will increase. Laptops are more vulnerable to 14-17 year olds for thieft and malicious viruses.
And how good is it for the eyes? Most of my friends who spend 6+ hours in front of a computer have bad eyes by the time they hit 25ish.
Rosco: "If brains were gunpowder, Enos couldn't blow his nose."
that printers and cartridges will become a hot item there. The kids will be using some pretty big fonts after a few months of this. The optemetrists should get busy also.
What?
Great. now the kids won't read a damn thing. As long as they can just search the text, they won't even have to do a half assed skim of it to find answers. Say goodby to what attention span they have.
I dunno.. I think this is a bad idea.
I prefer paper over a screen. Doesn't strain your eyes after a couple of hours.
It has a total population of less than 2500 people, it is 20 miles outside of Tucson, and the public high school there has only about 1000 students total. Oh, and try to find it on Google maps.
In the 1994-1995 school year, Community High School of Ann Arbor, MI issued many if not all of its students with laptops.
They didn't replace books, but they let the students do some things in Science and other classes that would've been hard without laptops.
For more information, see the Sciece Department's web page.
In college they definitely are. Where I teach (NC), however, we don't buy books for a year (or worse, a semester) then try and get $3 at the end. We buy our books for 5 years. It is expensive as hell initially and when books are lost/destroyed. However, $65 for a book that lasts 5 years is not too much to expect taxpayers to pay.
Additionally, competition between publishers is fierce; thus textbook companies "comp" us extras like test banks, lcd projectors, informational cd's etc. I know the price of these freebies is inherent in the book cost, but...
It is a HELLUVA lot easier to get a kid to fork up $65 for a book than the $850 for laptops. What happens when someone steals the laptop? Not too many people look to jack you for a textbook.
What if they decide to keep the laptop for themselves? This is not a private school where the cost is absorbed in tuition, this taxpayer money. Add the cost of maintenance on the computers and I see this as a short lived experiment -- one dropped bookbag and you need another $850.
A local university tried this at one school in the district checked out 30 laptops to a class. Only half of them were returned and/or usable.
Ignorance is not a crime; neither should it be a way of life
Congress control $ = inmates run the asylum
Man, people are going to turn into non-social zombies in 20 years.
[%] Cingular Ringtones
It's happening--my evil plan is finally working. Soon, I will rule the universe!! MUA HA HA HA HA!!! Seriously! I was so happy to read this. It only makes sense to use laptops. I realize that not all schools will be able to afford it yet, but it's a start. Now If I can only convince my boss that I'm more productive working at home on my laptop than in his "rented" office building--his loss... this is good news.
- nightcrawler "Reality is an illusion, albeit a ver persistent one..." -A.Einstein
Why laptops? Why not desktops with LCD monitors?
Laptops are not designed for long hours of operation. See this article
I am the guy the article is talking about.
I know how painful it is.
Will the seating be egonomic?
Will the students be educated in healthy computing?
These questions need to be answered before jumping to the use of laptops instead of text books, or else we will have hundreds of 10 yr olds with painful hands and necks.
I think it's a great idea, but where is the content coming from? Is there any board that's looking over the content to make sure it is sufficient? Not that schools can't do that themselves, but I know many states have strict guidelines for their textbooks, and I'd be curious to see how these online books/articles compare...
Instant Karma's gonna get you...
As someone who just came off of a 4-year "one-on-one" iBook program in Henrico County, I can tell you that there is NO MATERIAL available online or in software form that takes the place of books. PERIOD. Teacher's arn't there to CREATE, they are there to inspire and present the material. Some of my best teachers used the book 100% and gave out the book's quizes and tests. Now that's all gone away.
The laptop initiatives are FLAWED from the get-go, and no matter how you dress it up, it's going to be a failure.
Great! Now they can learn from reliable sources such as wikipedia!
1) Dropping a book versus dropping a laptop. Which will survive?
2) Power surges.
3) Do I have to buy my own electricity over spring and winter vacations?
4) Eye problems.
5) Eye problems.
6) See above.
7) People don't steal textbooks if left someplace. But someone definitely will if it's a laptop.
8) May I remind you of 4-6? (Someone else mentioned this in another post, but eye problems with monitors is such a problem.)
9) Computer malfunctions. Homework completely lost. Do it on paper? The move from paper books to laptops will make that more difficult. Try having a laptop next to you and a paper to the side of it. Writing surfaces.
I'm sorry, I think this is a lousy idea. Other people have commented about the dangers of giving a schoolful of kids expensive laptops, but there's something else: it SUCKS to read tons of text on a screen.
I (obviously) like computers, and I read tons of technical documentation online, since it's usually extremely interconnected, and hyperlinks help. But if I'm reading something that's pretty much linear (TFA didn't mention the structure of these "online articles", so I may be wrong there), or when I don't need to have a terminal window open at the same time to try out commands and whatnot, I prefer a printed page.
It's easier to move around and get comfortable with any reasonably sized book than with a laptop. (It's not just weight I'm talking about -- consider availability of AC power, glare, etc.)
I'm taking a class over the summer, and it's annoying me that one of the books hasn't been printed up -- instead we just go to the author's web site and download the PDF. I'd have gladly paid printing costs to get a bound meatspace copy.
I just think printed copies should always be an option.
Will the students be given free eye healthcare to cover the cost of corrective lenses?
This is a pretty bad idea that stems from the belief that you can throw technology at a problem and fix it. In this case, give the kids laptops and they'll get smarter. Don't get me wrong, laptops/computers/other technologies used in conjunction with other tools is a good idea. I'd suggest using the right tool for the job which would result in a helpful exposure to a variety of
learning tools- be it book or notebook.
Whoever thought the idea of give laptops to highschoolers must never have worked with any. I remember from my days in highschool. The kids are a destructive force. If it can be broken or stolen, it will be. I mean, seriously, how long until these things start getting stolen and showing up on Ebay? How do they prevent that from happening? Also, how do you stop some hormonely charged punk from getting mad and throwing a laptop on the ground? You know that it won't take but a day for some kid to forget that he's got a laptop in his backpack when he's throwing it in his locker. Books on the other hand don't break, and aren't hot items to sell. (College books are another story)
Plus I can see all kinds of new excuses...like I got a virus! Or my batteries died! Or Windows crashed/Clippy ate my paper! Books don't lose power, don't get virus, don't crash.
In the end, considering the group in questions (Highschoolers) books seem like the better solution. Plus, if a system isn't broken, why fix it? Books have been working for a long time, and can for a long time to come.
Don't take life so seriously. No one makes it out alive.
$850 for the laptop vs $650 for the text books.
:)
Are the eBooks free? I *highly* doubt it. So it's more like $850 for the laptop + $400 (or more!) for the eTexts from Scholastic of whoever.
Plus you gotta add in support costs (how much support do you have to do on a hunk of dead tree?), and a 1-2 year lifecycle (if you're *lucky*), vs. a 5-7 year life cycle for books. And now, if you drop/break/destroy/steal/loose a laptop, you don't just loose that Chemistry text book, but also that students entire course catalog. Are the ebook licenses per machine? Are they per-year payments, or is it a one time fee?
I work IT in a (substantially larger) public school system in VA, and I can tell, nobody is harder on computers than kids (if they mean it or just don't know any better).
But then again, with only 350 kids (hah, our smallest elementary schools is at least double that), I can see this as something that *could* work. No child is going to 'fall thru the cracks', and at that level, it is almost more cost effective. If the laptops are incorporated into the curriculum appropriately (used for REAL learning, instead of number crunchers and checking hotmail every ten minutes like most school PCs), I could see these kids getting one helluva value out of it.
Setup something like rsync to run during homeroom over the wireless link that will account for the PC's, backup the kids portfolio of homework, push new stuff....hrm, this could work out to be neat after all
I just hope they don't get raped on etext fees by their publishers of choice, like we would have been. Renew a (high school) calculus book every year. HAHA!
Although I use the web for a huge amount of my research and entertainment reading these days, I still also depend heavily on "textbooks" for more in-depth treatment of material. While I'm sure that using good old-fashioned books will not actually stop, I wonder if the lack of emphasis is a bit of a slippery slope: less demand for textbooks will lead to less production of good textbooks which will feed back to less demand for textbooks. Even with such projects as Gutenberg, Wikibooks, and others, is it possible to have the same quality of material online? Different types of material surely (e.g. multimedia), but I think that the format, physicality of books is something that we need to hold onto.
Helping with organizational effectiveness is our job.
Like rest of you, I've been staring at screens for twenty years and have an undeniable, ravenous appetite for all things innovative and technological. However, I lead a double life - biomedical engineer and english major. That other ever-present side of me has never gone away, no matter how much newly digitized information you throw at it. I devour books, textbook and entirely fictional alike - few paperbacks survive my multiple readings. It pains me to witness the downfall of literacy in our midst. The internet and computer have served as tools of limitless value; the merits of each cannot be enumerated. However, I pray that each child may at least once discover the profound nature of the written word upon its intended medium.
I'm a signature virus. Please copy me to your signature so I can replicate.
homework and papers! Instead of going online and buying one paper, now you can buy a program ro write many!
Evil people don't think they're evil. - George Lucas, Making of Ep III
It might be good to get some extra training using computers. That might be a good thing. Ouch, it hurts to be that optimistic.
Of course it's more fun to use a computer. Something happens everything i press a button! What good is a textbook for? No [replace with something adults don't want kids to see] in dry old books.
"use google" is going to be the answer for everything, and I think that is to let the kids down, BIG TIME! Hasn't the grownups more to tell the kids? Isn't there things that they haven't learnt yet that we need to tell the kids?
They should learn stuff, not learning to find them on the net, which unfortunately has become the easy way for teachers in hopeless situations.
What is this going to cost compared to textbooks? I hate to be the one to fix broken computers...
Evolution of Language Through The Ages: 6000 BC : ungh, grrf, booga 2000 AD : grep, awk, sed
Remember the old lady who would scold you if she found any dogeared pages or frayed covers?
:X
Well, I do.
The screen problem is a killer.
E-ink is one way around the screen problem. Basically, it is electronically controlled paper.
http://www.thebricktestament.com/the_law/when_to_
Maybe it's just me, but I find reading long articles off the screen cumbersome and inconvinient. I often print out anything longer than 3 pages, especially if it's something I really need to understand.
I would certainly hate it if all my (college) textbooks were pdfs and I had to pour over them off a monitor.
Maybe it's just habit or inertia, but I don't think I'd be able to study off a computer screen.
These teachers in universities, who make over $100,000 per year are not happy enough with their salaries. So they want to swindle the students even more. The teachers write a textbook, then sell it for over $100 a pop. Has anyone picked up a Biology or Chemistry textbook? I just looked, and the Chem 101 text at my old University is up to $148. And that does NOT include the lab or extra needed stuff (probably an extra $50).
Someone please explain why a new version of a book is needed every other year, and why a professor who is using the 7th edition of Chem won't let a student use the 6th edition of the book. Does the fundamentals of Chem 101 change that much year to year?
As for laptops, they are more expensive and will be stolen. One or two students, who are bright but anti-social will find a virus or write one, and try and take down the whole network. Soon, the schools will start banning knoppix cd's from the school right along with cigarettes.
The other problem of laptops is one my school had with calculators. The school entered into a contract with Texas Instruments, and then required all students to have a graphing TI-91 or some $100+ calculator for calc. I had a HP-48, and was told I could not take the class until I purchased a TI. What if some student has his own laptop, does he still have to buy the one the school is selling?
And you just know Microsoft will get involved in this. If the school decides to toss linux on all the laptops, MS will come running with free copies of windows. Everyone will use MS DRM software to read books. The school will not allow extra apps to be installed because of "security threats". So for 4 years, from ages 14-18, students will get stuck learning and using microsoft.
And while we are at it, what is to stop the same teacher who wrote Chem 101 for $148 from selling his ebook at $139? He can sell it at any price. The fact that it is on a laptop will not drive down cost.
Rosco: "If brains were gunpowder, Enos couldn't blow his nose."
So all the people that prefer the solid feeling and good pictures of textbooks will have to deal with adapting to on-screen presentations.
This seems like a really bad idea. Why not give students the option of using either electronic or paper-based media. That way students can use what they feel is best-suited to their learning-style/needs.
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools The way to dusty death. --Will
You know how many teenage boys 'touch' themselves? Whether or not it is against school policy, they will still use it to surf the web, download, and one thing will lead to another, and you're going to end up with dirty keyboards, which may or may not get cleaned before the next student uses it next year.
I have only one question: How the fuck do you expect kids to write, if you take the tools away from them? Most schools require students to print papers already. As a result, U.S. colleges and universities are flooded with people who cannot write in cursive. I met some college graduates who looked at my writing saying, "WTF, where did you learn how to write in cursive?" Well, see, in some countries writing in cursive is a requirement.
Instead of remembering how to spell, kids will use spell check and while teachers are talking "out of their asses" students will play their favorite games right in class! Instead of going low tech and giving student the basics, the state of Arizona decided to waste more money on stupid stuff that will become obsolete and outdated pretty soon. How about making laptops optional and spending more money on qualified teachers and programs that will increase the number of high school graduates and college students?
First, no one ever surfed for pr0n on their textbooks. "Dude, did you see that hot chick with the huge melons on page two hundred sixty eight in the section on advanced vector equations?
Second, no one ever got a virus from a textbook, except maybe if someone sneezed on it or something. "Kind of not feeling well. I think I shouldn't have borrowed Michelson's books over the weekend. I feel dizzy and..." THUD
Third, this just goes from one racket to another. Instead of required textbooks from questionable vendor contracts, we go to laptops with questionable support contracts. "Sixty dollars an hour, I don't care who you think you are. You want them in time for the exams, you pay. That'll be cash or certified check."
Fourth, we never had kids defeating security on their textbooks and modding them with useless add-ons worse than drawing in them or putting stickers on them. "Mr. Kensington, why is your desktop covered in fake nude photos of Brittney Spears and why do you have translucent faders and shadows enabled? What sort of skin is that? It's not school issued colors, sir. Give me your laptop and proceed to the principal's office." "I'll just save a copy of those nudes for myself..."
Fifth, the wonderful tradition of papercuts will now be eliminated. "Can I go to the nurse? I jammed my finger in the lid when I closed it and I caught my skin in the case zipper. No, not my other skin, wrong zipper. My hand."
Sixth, we replace inexpensive bludgeons with very expensive ones. "Dude, I am so going to crack your skull with this Inspiron if you don't get off my case."
I'm not seeing an upside to this, strangely. I don't see anyone thumbing through eBooks, which have largely failed in the public. The laptop format just doesn't work any way I can see.
Now if we had things as resilient at the fictional "pads" of ST:tNG, then maybe. OTOH, kids are good at destroying desks made to withstand them and charging buffalo. Laptops seem destined for scrap in short order, even "pads".
If my grammar and spelling are off, I am [distracted/tired/careless] (take your pick)
as practised in Vail will now include:
1. I spilled coffee on my keyboard [and, yes, they do drink caffeinated beverages at that age];
2. My dog drolled on my laptop and shorted it out;
3. My sister deleted my homework cause she hates me;
and my fave:
4. I got a worm/virus when I went to a website to research my project and it ate my paper.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
My old school went the laptop way. I remember hearing about some interesting things there - 1. It was the virus capital of Australia. There were more viruses there than anywhere else and some students actually tried infecting as many computers as possible. 2. The laptops were all insured. When a student wanted a brand new laptop (usually every year), they would hurl it from somewhere high. Insurance costs blew out. 3. The games, movies and music being swapped around were massive in scale. The music and movie industry would have been horrified to see it.
The title of the story says the school "won't use textbooks," not won't use books at all. If eliminating textbooks is all that the move is all about, then I'm all for it. After grade school, I hated textbooks because of the way they were often used by incompetent teachers as a crutch: "Class, turn to Chapter 10, page 335."
My best teachers in college didn't prescribe any textbooks. Instead we got reading lists.
In a field such as literature, a textbook could even pose the danger that your mind would be warped by the author's presentation. More often, only the supposedly "representative" short works of an author would be included in a textbook on world literature. If they are at all included, the longer works, such as the novels or epic poetry, would be mercilessly excerpted.
Thus you don't get to read the real James Joyce or T.S. Eliot, just snapshots that don't adequately reflect their pioneering contributions to modern literature (e.g. stream of consciousness or free verse in English). The effect of a textbook-based curriculum on a literature major is no different from the cultural experience of a tourist who stays in a country for two days. You return home thinking that beer and sausages are what makes Germans tick or that people in Spain and Latin America are lazy because they like to take siestas.
I'm a sci-fi vegan: I don't want the aliens to think we have as much right to live as the fried chickens we eat.
Why do instructors have to have us buy the $100+ books?!?
Evil people don't think they're evil. - George Lucas, Making of Ep III
[math page] | [math assignment] | [random math page] | [porn] | [porn] | [porn] | [porn] | [porn] | [porn] | [porn] | [porn] | [porn] | [porn] | [porn] | [porn] | [porn] | [porn] | [porn] | [porn] | [porn] | [porn] | [porn] | [porn] | [porn] | [porn] | [porn] | [porn] | [porn] | [porn]
the kiddies will all have a mouse-gesture to go to the first tab automagically. and they'll probably have something to obfuscate the page titles.
What they really need are new book publishers who are willing to create textbooks that never need to be replaced. Why isn't there a standard text for 'Algebra 1'?
Please sign petition to restore sanity to our banking system!!!
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I can't say if this particular experiment will succeed but I am confident that it cannot be worse than using contemporary textbooks. Looking at my kid's textbooks I see:
1) They are physically huge. My daughter's high-school history text is bigger than my college organic chemistry text. Kids have a hard time just carrying all their books. One of my daughter's friend had to carry books that added up to 60% of her body weight.
2) The books are huge because they are internally laid out like web pages with large graphics and multicolor text blocks. They are visually distracting and difficult to read. The same information could be presented in a much easier to read format in a much smaller book.
3) Many teachers don't use the text anyway. About half of my kid's classes use only supplemental materials and ignore the text books. They do this because the content of the books are garbage.
Textbooks today are the bastard children of many different political groups and processes and it really shows. It may be technologically premature to switch over to laptops but there is no way kids can have a worse experience than with deadtree text.
I absolutely, 100% guarantee that someone is
getting a kick-back here.
Check this link.
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
Remember some years ago when MS was pushing a reader for e-BOOKS that used DRM, MS Passport, and other nasties?
Now tell me that:
a) Linux on the laptops will be an alternative.
b) The e-Books/ material will be cheaper than the hard copy. (No evidence of that so far)
c) There will not be DRM encumbered readers and the e-material will not be copyright encumbered.
d) The teachers will not just buy one copy of the (copyrighted) e-Material and install it on 30 machines.
Without a commitment to Free (as in Freedom) infrastructure here, I see way more downside than upside.
are you series?? first off, you can barely trust kids now a days to bring the text book back at the end of the school year. what chance do you have of them bringing back a laptop?
also what about when the onslaught of tech support issue come up and ms marry mo, the english teacher, who thinks a mac address is the location of her ibook has to deal with it. even better, you have giving them to KIDS. kids are clumsy and dumb. they drop things. they fuck with things. they think 'format c:' is awesome. eating next to the laptop will even bring more exciting things.
aside from these obvious issues, who actually enjoys reading text books online? im sure there are people who dont mind, but the majority of people would prefer a book over scanning a monitor any time of the week.
kudos to them for trying something new. i just hope obvious issues arent overlooked. i remember when my highschool only tried to have a different classroom scheduling scheme and everything went to hell.
If the laptops are issued by the school and have acceptable use policies which include electronic surveilance measures, then it might be arguably a violation of 4th and 14th ammendment protections (IANAL). This is especially the case since the laptops would not be optional. Yes public schools are sort of like police states anyway, but consitutional protections still apply to some degree.
I guess now that the studies seem to indicate that HS students don't see free speech as any big deal, the right to security in ones person, papers, etc. (protection from unreasonable search and siezure) will be next on the attack list?
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
All-laptop high school to open in Vail
In addition to laptops they claim they are installing other hardware.
But Long is working to change things. Along with the 300 Smart Boards being installed this summer, TUSD also is putting response pads in select classrooms. It's similar to the "ask the audience" lifeline on the game show "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire" Teachers ask a question and can gauge the group's understanding based on the answers.
The Smart Boards are a huge step, she said. With a few clicks, teachers will be able to fly the class into Egypt through a digital map and highlight the history of the Valley of the Kings with photos, videos and multimedia timelines.
But these laptops will belong to the school. And what is to stop the schools from monitoring what the students do. Keyloggers are cheap, can they be stuck inside the laptops? What about software monitors. Everytime you log into the school network for class, it downloads what you typed the night before, including the chat you had with your buddy about how you hate Mr. Teeths english lit class and want to stick a wad of dynamite up his ass and light it. Or worse, what if innocent Jenny, the schools love and joy was IM'ing with Johnson, the black no-no. Will teachers start looking at Jenny as a slut, worthless with no value? Can a teacher use this information to single out a student to expolit?
Who will own the content that is typed in the laptop. The school can claim they own the laptops. Unlike a paper notebook, that is mine and it would take a court order to look in it. Plus, it is not like mail, which is even more gaurded. I can see relationships between people breaking down as everyone is worried about saying the wrong thing.
My old highschool was in the newspaper last year. The decided to instal a new honor code policy, where students were expected to act a certain way on and off campus. That means if two kids get into a fight at the McDonalds, the school will get involved. When I was in school, the highschool did not give a rats ass what I did at 9pm, I was off grounds. What about laptops. How will this tie into the honor system?
Rosco: "If brains were gunpowder, Enos couldn't blow his nose."
The textbook replacement cries out for something like an ebook. Why? If designed right you'd get:
More rugged. Laptops have harddrives, keyboards, ports, etc. The more moving parts, and complexity the more likely it is to break. An ebook could eliminate all this via flash memory and touch screens. A gig of flash memory would likely be able to hold all the textbooks a kid would need for a year. Make it componentized so you could replace the touchscreen very easily.
Longer battery life. You really need very minimal processing power for an ebook, so you could use very low power processors. Battery lifetimes of 12-24 hours would be easy.
Lower OS complexity/OS access. If you make an ebook like an appliance and give the user only access to the core functions (no installing 3rd party apps for instance) then you solve all the problems of the OS being corrupted. Allow only data to be sent to/from the textbook.
Lower value to thieves. How many people really want an inexpensive ebook vs a laptop? If all you can do is read textbooks from it, it's a much smaller theft target.
What's the downside? Well the kids wouldn't be able to do homework on it. Big deal. They can't do homework on a printed textbook now.
The problem is the textbook publishers don't want to do it. For the most part they make money because textbooks wear out, not because the information in them needs changing/updating. How much has Calculus changed over the last 20 years? My guess is not at all. Science changes a little, maybe you'd need to update the information every 10 years (barring creationist lies). History textbooks probbably need more updating, but that's more due to changes in the political climate.
AccountKiller
Try working in laptop repair for a COLLEGE that has the laptop lease program (Babson College namely, also UNC, etc). It's really not much better...
My Screen is broken
I dropped it
I lost it
It won't turn on, etc
now, add in even more fun:
My keyboard is typing all numbers
How do you turn NumLock off
I spilled beer on my laptop
My roomate spilled beer on my laptop
I PUKED ON MY LAPTOP
I'm not kidding. It happened. More than once. Puke on a laptop. Maybe it might actually be good to help dumbass kids get this kind of thing out of their systems earlier in life.
Partial Credit: The Engineer's Best friend
"Well, the bridge didn't fall all the way down!"
laptops, haxx0red by someone who cherry picks their unencrypted WiFi packets and sets them searching for intelligent life in outer space?
...
I'm sure someone will
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
7) People don't steal textbooks if left someplace. But someone definitely will if it's a laptop.
I've walked my son to school since kindergarten, and until grade 8 I carried his backpack.
I'd be more worried about adding another 10 pounds of weight to an already overloaded backpack, actually.
In my day we used these input and recording devices called pen, paper, and pencil. And we liked it!
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
I don't know if the breakable issue is such a big deal for HS students (I think it depends on the HS). But if it is then there are very sturdy laptops that can handle drops, are waterproof...
o ugh_story.asp
http://www.terralogic.co.uk/
http://www.dolch.com/html/notepac.html
http://www.ruggednotebooks.com/index.asp
http://www.panasonic.ca/English/Office/notebook/t
http://www.argonautcomputer.com/laptops.htm
.....we will be reading an article about how x number of these students hacked into the school's server or downloaded MP3s or whatever and they're up on charges.
(I'm about to leave the office for my "second job" as a Shakespearean actor, so you kinda pushed the button. Sorry.)
Shakespeare (and literature in general) needs to be taught more like physics (wait, hear me out) and less like history and biology are usually taught. The goal isn't whether you can read the text and translate it well enough to figure out who killed Mercutio. The goal is to develop an appreciation for the process of reading, and for the pleasures of literature.
Just throwing somebody the e-text isn't sufficient, but just throwing a copy of the Penguin edition and telling them to have it read by next Wednesday isn't substantially better. For Shakespeare, read it out loud. Don't just have them read it to each other, at least not at first, because they don't know what's going on.
That's actually something that could be done better with the laptop. It's a multimedia device. Let them hear actors reading, or watch actors performing. Good actors can make the page come alive far better than a high school freshman can. That's their job.
Using the laptop as a substitute for paper is worthless. But there are some great ways to start with the laptop and use it to change the way we teach. That's my rant for literature, but expand the thinking to watching demonstrations of physics, or using a fly-through 3D model of a plant in biology.
I would love to be able to have a high school senior pick up a copy of Hamlet and be able to truly understand it, but only once you've given him or her the basics. I certainly don't expect a freshman to be able to do more with Romeo and Juliet than look up the hard words in the footnotes and try to parse the syntax. Which means that they're reading all the words and missing everything that's really there, and they'll never do any better with Hamlet three years later.
If all they can do is tell you that Laertes' father is Polonius, you've wasted their time and yours. But if they've seen Laertes overwhelming rage and blame for Hamlet, and they have some idea why it sounds so awesome when he says, "I would cut his throat in the church," you've really accomplished something.
Academia teaches the evil of singularity to human cubics - born of opposites. - Teachers are evil and this Time Cube guy bets USD10,000 he knows the truth.
You can't handle the truth.
Vail Unified School District's decision to go with an all-electronic school is rare, experts say. Often, cost, insecurity, ignorance and institutional constraints prevent schools from making the leap away from paper.[emphasis added]
I'm guessing that ignorance will still prevail, and Windows will be installed on the laptops, with its usual compliment of security and stability issues.
But that's not my point. Only an ignoramus would assume that a transition to laptops would be better. In many respects, paper is still superior to its electronic counterpart:
Yes, computers can do some really amazing things. But in the end, they are still a machine, nothing more. What irks me is that parents and school districts fawn over computers in the classroom, with the mistaken belief that the computer will turn their son or daughter into some kind of genius. It won't. Real education (that is, learning) requires effort, and if you remove the effort, so goes the education.
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
If your agenda has nothing to do with the progress and well-being of the students, then this is brilliant. How else can you bleed public school funding, while at the same time hand that money directly to a corporation?
If the public school system falls apart you can privatize schooling just like the current administration wants to privatize every other public program. Of course, no sane politician will outright say "i'd like to see public schooling dissolved," since that would be political suicide.
If some tech. company profits while the public school system is slowly picked apart, wouldn't that further serve the base agenda?
Expect to see the spread of more fund-draining ideas like this in the future. Eventually they will progress from ideas, to guidelines, to regulations, to laws. They will all sound well-meaning from the outside, but lack a few important requirements to become practical.
Don't forget about "No child left behind." Another idea with a feel-good concept on the outside, but adds extra burdens and costs to the public school system. That is, extra burdens and costs with no provisions to compensate for them.
Simply brilliant.
"Where's the ANY Key?"
School districts choose their textbooks based on how the content matches the curriculum. Who is going to provide all the content that they teach the students? Is it a pre-defined (censored) list of websites, or some in-house Intranet solution that needs to be populated? Maybe some third-party provider that helps bankroll the laptops, with their own agenda (i.e. Darwinism vs. Creationism)?
Traditional textbook providers aren't very keen on providing their content online. This would require a major paradigm shift by all the providers to a full online in order to allow districts the choices that they currently have.
Along with all the other administrative headaches involved (Anti-virus, security, passwords, hardware, general helpdesk issues), this is going to add to the $850 per laptop.
...and he specifically asked for him to be sent to the other high school in Vail because of this.
His reasoning is that teenagers have enough to distract them as is - raging hormones, stupidity, etc. that they don't need another thing to keep them from paying attention. His son has a PC of his own at home, high speed access, etc. - so there's no fear of technology in a family where both parents work at IBM.
Also, think about how many things go wrong with your laptop on a business trip or in a meeting or in other scenarios, and then multiply this by a factor of 100 to account for mischief, theft, installing unauthorized programs, loss, dead batteries, ad nauseam to account for teenagers who have no respect for a device that is simply given to them. In their mind, the faster it breaks the better as they get out of class for a while.
My consern is that students who do care about security (call them white hats) will want to do obvious things like install firefox (or at least disable the activex and VBS elements in IE) , spybot, MS Antispy, and tweak things like SW firewalls, access permittions, all the stuff that a prudent power user would do to tune a laptop used in such an open place could be punnished or kicked out
and what if a student were to loose "computing privileges" they would be fucked...
You should keep it as low tech as possible in order to teach them not to cheat. This is just going to make kids more stupid.
||| I still can't believe Parkay's not butter.
Laptops replacing textbooks? Won't make a difference. The traditional educational system is severly broken. But don't take my word for it. Take a look at what the 1991 New York State Teacher of the Year who quit education says about what's wrong.
*** Sigs are a stupid waste of bandwidth.
Hopefully their textbooks aren't DRM'd, or this is the beginning of what Stallman laid out in his Right to Read essay. Or was that Eric Raymond? Some slashdotter'll know.
I guess thats because its hard to get "science" textbooks that don't have chapters on Creationism. I bet they run Chick tracts as screensavers as well.
I think this is a pretty horrible idea for two reasons.
#1: Try getting a kid to read a textbook. Now try getting that same kid to read a "wall of text" on a computer. Most teenagers (and even most adults) react to walls of text on the net as something to skip over and avoid. Kids will be less willing to read when faced with a computer with no pages, just 100's of black words on a white background. Sprinkling pictures here and there won't help.
#2: Have you tried reading books on laptops? It's hard on your eyes, on your back, on your arms, on your mental health, everything.
IMHO, bad idea. Stick with textbooks. Or, give everyone a Sony Librie.
If O2 is good, O3 must be 1.5 times better!
... Many radicals have been heard claiming that during their protest of this, there will be a massive organized demonstration involving, among other things, book deletions!
"Why?
There isn't really any advantage in learning from a computer. "
Have you seen sixth graders on the way to school lately? They're crushed under the weight of their textbooks, wearing backpacks almost as large as themselves.
Somewhere along the way we got confused about what textbooks are for. Teachers now use them both for the homework assignment and for in class teaching. That means carting every book you might need home with you.
When I was in sixth grade, they told us "You should be doing half an hour a night of homework for every class that you're in." That kind of schedule meant that I had to carry five textbooks and five binders to and from school. My backpack weighed literally 40 pounds. At the time, I was proud of that. The permanent damage to my spine has since changed my mind.
As far as I know, the problem is only getting worse.
Sure, maybe you feel more comfortable reading from a book, but that's mostly because of the mind-bogglingly stupid use of WYSIWYG in *every* application. Switch your monitor to white on black, you'll have a whole new outlook on life. With macs you can do this with one key combo, I don't know how easy it is on a PC.
Obviously, staring into a lightbulb, which is reading a PDF is normally like, is uncomfortable. Putting a 90 pound child under 40 pounds of books and other supplies is much worse. Bad enough just carrying it, but I've seen what happens when a child trips under that weight. It's a real mess.
Personally, I'd be happiest if the textbooks stayed at home and no teaching was done from them at all at school, but that alternative just doesn't seem to work. If the teachers are going to something as a crutch, at least let it be something that doesn't leave the child on crutches.
"It is a HELLUVA lot easier to get a kid to fork up $65 for a book than the $850 for laptops. What happens when someone steals the laptop? Not too many people look to jack you for a textbook."
Just buying the laptop doesn't mean the textbooks will be free. You still need to pay for electronic copies of the textbooks as well.
Vote for Pedro
If all we have are tethered E-books, who is to say that overtime 'facts' are not being changed to suit whomever is in power at the time?
Or what happens when the government or school decides a 'book' is unacceptable? It happens all the time, where books are pulled from the shelves and 'banned' from students.
At least with real paper books you can fight against both of these problems. Unless they start burning 'unacceptable information', the original book will transcend being banned or 're-written'.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I think it was the whitelist. The idea of the whitelist of executables triggered tinfoil mode violently. That led to the not-so-proper invocation of Its Unholiness, TCPA, etc., etc., etc. Really rather nasty looking now that I realize.
And using it the cross-site, talk-smack manner that I did doesn't help any.
Oops.
I'd rather have textbooks as they are way more convenient than notebooks. I just can't imagine having to study for hours while watching a notebook display. I guess many of the students will just print out all of their study material at home.
... ;)
I still remember that we had to learn a bunch of cultural components at high school. He had both the textbook and the digital version of the subject matter. He just give us the CD ROM and almost everyone from our class either printed all of the pages or asked him for the textbook.
Also I think it will lead to much more distraction as notebooks also offers much more interesting things such as playing games, watching movies, internet,
Call me old fashioned, but I learn better using a textbook than I ever would using a computer. Now I realize where I'm posting this, but unless the laptops are tabletPCs it's much more difficult to take GOOD notes and there's something to be said about a good 'ol paper book. Granted, the internet and computers DEFINITLY have their place in education. A Social Psych class I'm taking right now has a feature that allows me to do easily do more research online with what I'm reading in the textbook. I find that alot of fun and it makes the class much more enjoyable. To Sum Up: E-texbooks = bad; Textbooks + Online Component= good
instead of forcing us to buy new editions of textbooks every year now we can be forced to buy new notebooks/software every year.....at inflated school bookstore prices!
Learn to spell moron, you sound like you're in 4th grade.
As of late, I thought it had been fairly well established that technology does nothing to help students learn more, or learn better. When I see stories like this, it makes me wonder which crony's friend/relative is getting the contract.
I couldn't figure from the article if they're having a risky/rewarding plan on windows, or with a linux/freeBSD.
'cause 850$ buys just the laptop, not software.
I'd hate the school to pay a "microsoft service pack" tax and have subtle viruses change the textbooks to the wrong anwsers you put on your last test so you get 100%. (-;
Good or bad, this plan does have one flaw. If darwin (or the round earth theory) gets pulled out and you're just a kid, you don't see a big homeland security sticker on it so smart kids know they're being mislead.
Also, it might allow for instant and retroactive changes to the history of countries that were included in the axis-of-evil just 10 minutes ago! Not good for critical thinking.
Microsoft is pure dog-ma. FreeBSD is pure cat-ma.
Free the ebooks people!
Don't believe me? Read on...
The purpose of laptops in school is to get data on them electronically, with the secondary benefit of books which auto-expire at the end of the school year(s). This is already being done quite efficiently in some law schools. You purchase a laptop, which contains all the required law books on it electronically. You pay for them as part of the price. But guess what, if you want those books after you graduate, you have a new subscription fee to pay - otherwise your books are rendered unusable. They expire in 4 years after purchase.
In this fashion publishers are ensuring a new guaranteed form of revenue. To a large extent this is already in place with colleges demanding new versions of text books every year, some with ridiculously minor changes. Plus, now it's electronic, with little to no cost being eaten up with shipping, etc. Don't for a minute believe that the books will become cheaper as a result...
If the retarded fundies can't beat on the school board to use genesis instead of a biology text, what will they do? ID is not yet available as an on line text is it?
SLASHDOT: news for people who can't concentrate on work or have no life at all and got tired of yelling back at the TV.
Who said they were the first. The charter school I attended my junior year of high school at provided a laptop for every student and ran the entire thing using wireless. There were no text books, until some of the students started complaining in math.
The problems encountered were, the school wanted to give everyone a roaming profile for the laptops making every done over the 802.11B network slow as all hell. The students, including me, installed games and had a lot of fun playing UT during class. The las and largest problem was that about 80% of the students broke their laptops at least once, both in software and hardware. The worst was one who split his laptop somehow! There was only about 80 students, but it did happen.
FYI they ditched all the laptops the next year.
I am an IT manager for a K-12 school district in Arizona (not the one in the article) and I think this idea has a lot of potential.
Digital content is better than paper, no question. If it is at all reasonable to replace paper books with laptops or something similar, the payoff is well worth the difficulty.
Books are expensive, while this example lists a $850 laptop there are cheaper options, or perhaps they're going with a more rugged design to curb some of the damage and destruction issues. Kids lose and destroy books too, while laptops may have more issues I don't see this as a show stopper. On the software side, these laptops are a textbook replacement, not a free PC for the kids. If locked down and secured (good application for Linux!) only giving students access to what they absolutely need, I'm sure hurdles can be overcome to make this type of deployment worthwhile.
On the tinfoil hat side, revisionist history and such are a potential problem, but realistically we change at least one subject worth of textbooks each year. Abuse is possible anyway, and while this may open the door a bit wider, it also swings both ways. We have to keep up with state standards that currently change a lot faster than we can evaluate and purchase new books. Making sure the material fits the standards is the #1 issue school districts face today (test scores are our bottom line). This deployment of technology is a huge leap ahead in being able to address this issue quickly and efficiently.
All this, not to even mention the fact that audio/video and interactive content help students learn on average way better than text and pictures alone. In conjunction with the quality teaching we need in the classroom no matter what, this toolset has tons of potential to help kids learn better than they could with paper books.
So, while I'm glad I'm not the first one doing it, I hope it goes well for them as I expect to be doing the same a few years down the road.
My experience is that students hate electronic books. Of my own community college students, about 75% buy them in the bookstore for convenience, while the other 25% download them and print them out (saves a small amount of money, but it's a hassle, and the finished product isn't very nice). The percentage of students who don't use a hardcopy is zero. True, some might do it if they were forced to carry a laptop around, but that just begs the question of why anyone would want to force students to carry laptops around -- dopey idea, IMO.
The same seems to be true at other schools that use my books. I just recently had a student at another school order some books directly from me, and she mentioned that she was very upset at her school's bookstore for not stocking enough. She had been working from the downloads, but that's not what she wanted.
Coincidentally, there's a neighborhood grade school near me (not the one my kids go to) that provides laptops to some of their students, and soon is going to make it universal. My perception is that it's purely a PR thing to impress gullible parents with how high-tech the school is. (It's in a new development where a house with no yard goes for $600,000 --- I'm glad we bought a house in this town before the real estate craziness happened!)
Find free books.
It's more than likely that every child in that class can afford a much better laptop than the one the district is providing.
Speaking as a physics graduate student in a field where practically all the research material I need (published papers) is freely downloadable, I still think this is a very dumb idea.
Reading off a screen is fine if just want to skim a quick article, but when you're dealing with material that you really need to go over several times, digest and understand (i.e. the kind of thing they put in textbooks), there's no substitute for having a hard copy. And unless all these students have quick and easy access to a printer both at home and at school (and you've budgeted for the printing costs) a lot of the supposed advantage is lost.
While I think putting course materials online is a Good Thing, the idea (commonly expressed at universities) that doing this as a substitute for printouts will "save a few trees" is generally just a way of avoiding saying "if you want a printout you'll have to pay for it". I can't wait until they come up with the low-power consumption device with a screen as pleasant to read as a piece of paper that I can store the whole of Project Gutenberg on, but until then, focused studying really needs paper.
While I am all for using technology in schools, god knows they need 'em, it seems like each time they do this the systems get locked down really tight, but when one sharp kid finds a way around that they just get busted for it. One heck of a way to disourage using your brain...
http://fairuse.stanford.edu/Copyright_and_Fair_Us
Maybe students will bring in multiple, conflicting sources, and a true scholarly discussion will ensue.
Always the dreamer. Maybe someday.
Seriously, as if not putting draconian measures on the laptops aren't bad enough, he is actualy laughing and gloating about it. Yeah, I know it's school property, and they do need to set some limits, but this is fucking bonkers.
What's next, checking documents automaticly to prevent kids from writing anything that the school dosen't "like"?
You can bet the "textbooks" will be DRM-encumbered. So long to freedom of learning and the scientific method. Now high school students' knowledge will be "Intellectual Property", to be owned and curtailed by the usual corporate suspects.
for students to get their porn!
Kudos!
In my (then) 5th grade class laptops were phased in. My class was the 2nd year to get them, so since 1994 it started, and was fully completed by 1997. This was in Australia though. And before wireless was invented, so I guess I can't claim that. Playing quake 1 and the various mods of it at the time in class, as well as my own personal interests in programming etc. were about the most useful thing I did with mine, because our teachers were clueless.
But not the first elsewhere -- I live in northern minnesota and the local charter schools have been giving students laptops for a long time now. They have to pay for an insurance policy (like $50 a year) and that's about it. Frankly, I like real books, but if e-books could be made available for cheap at the college level it'd be so much better than spending $500 on books a semester.
Here's the part where Steve Jobs swoops in and saves the day, cornering the tablet and education markets all on a single Tuesday.
I don't think I need to say anymore.
Let's see... if the school day starts at 9am and finishes at 3pm... so that's 6hrs...
-Anybody know of a $850 laptop with a 6hr battery?
"I can't do my homework b/c IT is reimaging the OS"
In my school system, I barely have enough budget for paper.
I grew up in the Vail School District, and my sister will actually be attending Empire (and getting one of the laptops). It's a brilliant idea, as Vail has always tried to be technologically advanced, or at least current. All of the highschools offer interesting computer courses that teach a lot of real world skills with computes. They've always had some fairly fresh Mac equipment, and I've been hired for temp. web programming projects and network setups at some of the Vail middle schools.
Before the students get the laptop, they'll have to complete a course on how to use and care for them; and I know a lot of kids in my area who are going to get a lot out of these laptops.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Please, can we stop e-xperimenting with our kids? I'm an enormous advocate of technology where appropriate, but it is not appropriate in the base education of our children. We do not need to give our children iPods or laptops for "educational" purposes and we do not need to do away with paper, pencils, hole punches, crayons, rubber bands, rubber stamps, finger paint, rollerball pens, Trapper Keepers or any other school supplies (well ok, rubber stamps can go and that's not really a school supply anyway).
Kids will eventually need computer skills to varying degrees as their studies become more specialized and they enter the workforce. But right now, even in high school, they still need to practice reading and writing the old fashioned way (some of them still need to learn it). And yes, they need to know how to use books. How to use a Table of Contents, an index, how to scan text with their eyes to find a passage without an electronic full-text index -- to appreciate the feeling of curling up with a book anywhere they want to read. A BOOK -- not a computer screen.
Argh!
RP
Yeah we have that too. The teachers wave their hands around and tell the kids to 'go do some research on the internet. bring back a powerpoint in 2 weeks'.
Because of collective bargaining, A good computer teacher was bumped down to remedial math at my HS. In his place, a series of dilettants were foisted upon us. "I'll learn C[pascal,vb,etc.] while i teach it to you" was a phrase I heard much of while taking yet another quiz on how to open files with the file manager tool. I should'a taken band.
The reason? seniority. The first dilettant had more total experience in the system.. (actually both of them had, the second was the most flighty. She ended up as a guidance counselor.. MY guidance counselor.. argh) The guy who knew what he was doing (had an actual degree in compsci...) ended up in a class where nobody appreciated him and made fun of his accent.
Hopefully this kind of thing didn't happen in the more important subjects like science, math, foreign language or english.
The big irony is that I have family in the teacher's unions and they always it's about the students. Every time they strike for more salary or benefits, its about the students. Face it, the teacher's unions are like any other union. they're their to benefit the average worker. As a result, inferior workers will be kept on and superior workers will fail to be paid their worth, but everyone will have job security...maybe. Students are the PRODUCT.
for computing to be effective you hit the nail on the head. you listed issues that plague all IT, not just schools.. giving stuff to kids just brings out the problems that already exist in the sytem... thanks!
Perhaps we can replace a few words in your statement...
Yeah, but mindlessly pissing money down a hole has been touted as the way to fix medicine for so long, hardly anyone knows how to do anything else, even though it has never worked.
Hire good doctors. This requires paying a decent salary. Dismantle the doctors' unions, which serve only themselves and are largely responsible for the horrible mess our healthcare system is in, by locking in bad doctors and bad ideas. Hold hospitals accountable by allowing vouchers, which will force competition.
Based on my experience as a volunteer brain surgeon and feedback from kids, parents and mal-practice attorneys, I'm pretty good at it. Kids like me and I like them (and I've got 4 of my own). We communicate well and the kids seem to both learn and have fun. I would love to practice medicine professionally, but I can't afford the huge pay cut and I will never take a job that requires me to join a union.
Teaching is a profession, which requires continual training to maintain appropriate "practice." Mal-practice is the term for not following medical "practice." Why are teachers allowed to simply teach. The book reference in the title is something many should read.
"The problem is the textbook publishers don't want to do it. For the most part they make money because textbooks wear out, not because the information in them needs changing/updating."
I design textbooks at the primary level. They suck! they are not updated so much as completely rewritten. Most people really have no clue as to what goes into these things, and the combination of methods, teacher resources, and state specific requirements makes an old text book essentially useless. It is data more than you might suspect. When was the last time you bought a printed encyclopedia?
$800 = 1 Laptop
$800 = 20 Text Books
20 Text Books, over 5 years can teach 100 students for $800.
1 Laptop over 5 years can teach 5 students.
$800 for 100 students or $800 for 5 students?
Dont forget the cost of broken laptops, stolen laptops, 'lost' laptops, deleted software, reloading software, software licences, software audits, enforcement of abuse policies, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc and so on.
With all the extra overhead of laptops you wont even get 5 students for $800, it will be more like 2 students for $800.
I can't turn in my assignment because the cat peed on the laptop, the dog ate the floppy, and the baby threw up into the printer.
http://www.filamentbooks.com/ebcontent/devices/115 0_spec.asp
the device looks good, but the price for it is free but you have to join a club (gotta buy books)
After using a computer for many years, I seem to have started developing some kind of RSI.
It seems like a bad move to me to switch to using computers instead of text books.
I am all for using computers in education, being a computer geek myself, but it should be moderate.
Maybe I misunderstood but the article says the school is going to "hand" each student an $850 laptop for the whole year. Sounds to me like the students don't have to pay for them. They are just being issued like public schools issue textbooks.
Here's tThe part that gets me:
the move to electronic materials gets teachers away from the habit of simply marching through a textbook each year.
Like hell. Uninspired teachers who simply trudge through a curriculum, or essentially read the textbook to the students, will do the same thing whether the material is on paper or on a series of websites. Probably sounds good in a school board meeting though.
have to read and understand anything handwritten by the students who will be educated at that school. If they can still write with a pen at all, after a few years of laptop only homework.
Not that I've written anything more than sticky notes by hand in the last few years, but at least one does not forget how to if you learned it in school. Umm, I hope...
*goes to search a pen*
Publishers should divide their textbooks into two parts. Easier to lug around that way...
Maybe even three or four parts with some of 'em.
Start distributing audio books already. Why does the peons need to know how to read & write? Just look at /. comments - most people here seem to have a hard time to write even the simpliest words without errors. Just stop teaching the brats all those annoying letters and make them ask wise men [TM] to read for them.
Not so fast folks! Great idea but how do you apply it? With a laptop, you have a tool, not a plan. How many of the teachers that will teach to these students have enough content knowledge to present material in a thorough, thoughtful, and accurate manner. I am a high school teacher and no fan of textbooks... but have any of you tried to find good information on the web, in journals, and other media that allows for a systematic approach to teaching content material? It is very difficult to locate. How many teachers will take the time? Textbooks may be a better source at the current time. I am the self professed techno geek in the science department at my school. I have been a reviewer for NSTA's SciLINKS for years and have been very involved in the development of what are now called SciGuides. Good science content is very difficult to locate and sometimes even more difficult to use. When you've given the students their laptop, consider that you have given them an empty notebook. Not much use really. Cheaper at Staples. Now for the teachers... just how many of these instructors will be able to handle their entire class needing help at one time because a page doesn't load properly or a BSOD. Sounds like a recipe for disaster, no, another of those wonderful "educational flavors of the month."
maybe i'll go back to HS and get my GED in AZ.
Read Fahrenheit 451 again. There was never a central authority out to control history, as in 1984, it was the people who wanted the book burning "show".
There was a war going on in the background; Kids were going around killing each other etc etc. The big deal is that no one gave a rats arse because everyone was doing themselves in on wide screen reality television and sport. Sound familiar?
What you had was a hendostic society which only lived for the quick thrill; The reason they were burning books (and making hugh a show about it) was because books had come to represent a afrount to this "life style". Being a thing that could not easily be shouted down by low quality entertainment and appeals to pathetic emotional (or moral) arguments.
What is scary about that book is individually we all know that given a choice of either living in a nice and comfortable drug laced environment or, alternatively, being forced to constantly question our belief's; we all know which one we would take.
It was the degeneration of the medium itself and the society that allowed it that was the problem not the medium. Books, Televisions and Computers are not evil in themselves, but simply tools or doorways to ideas. The real question lies in how much providence lies in those ideas and always will.
If you do the more evil to less evil - pissing contest -benchmark in relation to each medium you could even argue that computers are actually better then books, it's simply that books have simply been around for longer and, as a result, we trust them more. After all, aren't most text books simply a scam?
If, for example, you waved a magic wade and winked all books out of existance tomorrow, then guess what. The data contained in those books would still exist - since I don't buy the argument that it is easier to corrupt the content of a book in the online version then the offline. The people who wrote those books would still be around and the audience would still exist. The only people really worse off would be the publishers.
That is completely wrong, my school district, Roanoke County Public Schools, Roanoke, Virginia has been assigning laptops to all of their 5000+ high school students for several years now, using them at home + at school, transitioning to the point of a zero-textbook policy. My school was actually the first [in our school system at least] to implement this policy. The computers are Dell Latitudes, and are commonly broken. Roanoke County hopes to soon implement the same policy in all secondary schools.
P.S. if you thought it was hard to stay out of trouble before, try getting an hour of detention for playing solitaire during lunch. (or 3 hours for shutting down other students computers with the tsshutdn function of terminal services within command prompt and then telling everyone you know how to do it...) Oh yeah, and are schools are also 100% wireless using proffesional linksys access points.
<overrated>Insert Sig Here</overrated>
last I heard there wasn't a thriving black market for stolen school text books.
When the students have reach a level where they can synthesize ideas from different sources and reach their own conclusion, then you are absolutely right. But do you really think HS physics students should read Newton's writing? Should 1st course calculus focus on reading Leibniz?
As for using the Internet, your teacher can still print texts from the Internet and give them as handouts to students. Laptops wouldn't be needed.
If you just throw the students onto the internet, you'll get papers detailing the "Impact of the Cthulu cult on ancient gaelic culture"!
"Think hard about why software engineers don't have a union."
At just the cost of a laptop... Now I think of all those poor families that cannot afford private schools... Oh wait, they are sending the kids to public schools...
Beta Sucks
You: This is already happening, and it is indeed scary.
That's a LIE. (Score: -1 , lying) It is not happening, there is a trace.
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/1998/dom/980302
See? You can buy Scowcroft & Bush's "A World Transformed" at your local oligopolist for $18.90. It's their copyright, pay them. Heck, it's their intellectual creation, their words, they deserve it.
Even if the article is gone from your free-as-in-beer internets, it does not mean that we already are in a '1984' future.
In fact it's like back in the pre-internet 1980's (oh, irony), when all we had were paper books. That you had to buy for cash.
And now please stop scaring people.
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