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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."
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.
If you bothered to RTFA you would see that there is a Vail Arizona. Also a little research and you would come up with http://www.vail.k12.az.us/
My Doom. The gift that keeps on giving
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.
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.
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.
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.
It has actually not been proven that "real, material book[s]" make for more effective learning. I've actually had a very effective college-level course that was strictly online and actually based on a role-playing game. Sounds a bit silly, but it kept me interested.
Let's get books out already. We have the technology to provide students with tablet PCs containing all of the text-information necessary (and then some) for every class they have. AND if those computers could be reused year after year, then you probably have a cheaper solution.
Furthermore, as a soon-to-be science teacher, I don't really feel the use of textbooks to be necessary at all. There is much more accurate and up-to-date information to be found in scientific journals/magazines, and, believe it or not, on the internet. Anyway, learning doesn't occur just by looking at a book, it comes through experience and observation.
When I was in elementary school, most books lasted 4+ years.
In fact, I can't ever remember having a book that lasted only 1 year.
There was the student name panel on the inside of the front cover where the current student had to write his/her name and teacher.
There were kids who got the same books that their older siblings used that were 2 to 4 years older.
if you steal from one source, that is plagiarism, if you steal from many, well, that's just research.
Local news reported a $54 optional insurance fee for parents to cover the laptops in case of damage/theft.
Anyone who has ever read 1984 knows that this is one of the hallmarks of a controlled society.
t h.html
As soon as a book can (untraceably) be edited much objectivity is lost.
This is already happening, and it is indeed scary.
They just don't quite have the untraceable part down yet.
About a decade ago, Time Magazine published an essay by Bush Sr and Secretary of Defense Scowcroft on why they chose not take out Sadam during the first gulf war. A lot of the points they made have been proven true today.
Time DELETED the article from their online archives. It was as if it were never written, URLs that once worked are now road-kill on the information super-highway. Not only that, but significant changes were made to other articles in that same issues as compared to the print version.
Fortunately it wasn't quite so untraceable and has been widely reported (not widely enough IMNHO). Here is one take on the story, you can find plenty more by googling for bush scowcroft "reasons not to invade".
http://eee.uci.edu/programs/comp/39c/google/heske
My mistake for not clarifying in my original reply; I teach at a high school, not a college, hence the burden of money being taxpayer driven.
I think it is a bit easier at the college level because many times you can roll the cost of computers into tuition and actually "give" students the laptop. Despite what the Governator has/not done, many private uni's have given freshmen a laptop. (I think Wake Forest has done it for a few years and know Duke "gives" some odd gifts (they gave I-pods last year).
Ignorance is not a crime; neither should it be a way of life
Congress control $ = inmates run the asylum
Um, they sue all the time to get grades changed. A guy I worked with was sued after his third year as a teacher because he failed a kid. She was slated to be the valedictorian, got her solid class rank (many districts establish a valedictorian in January or February of their senior year), and just stopped doing any work. He failed her, and got to spend the next summer and fall in and out of court non-stop. It's also fairly common to sue the district (which has money) and name the teacher(s) as co-defendants.
The union doesn't just pay up if I'm found to owe $2 million. They also pay all lawyers' fees, which is far more important in a lot of cases.