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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."
Textbook sales are a racket worthy of the Gambino family.
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.
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.
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!?
What does technology, in the form of laptops, have to do with a good education? As a HS senior, the most productive learning experiance I've had has come from quality teachers that have an intrest in teaching rather than just moving students through the system and crunching points. I'd feel a whole lot better of my school put more money into training and acquiring good teachers that some nearly useless technology that is just a crutch.
Those who study history are doomed to watch others repeat it.
I'm sure they'll still charge $200, only now it will be for a 1 year license rather than this year's edition.
they'll be about as far away from their eyes as the books they were reading last year... i highly doubt this will be an issue...
"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."
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
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.
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.
Well, the solution is to create an honest-to-god ebook solution: a hundred dollar lcd non-backlit cheapo unit, like a larger palm, the size of a piece of notebook paper, with an ethernet jack for transfering files in and out of non-volatile memory. It should run on AAA cells. It should be strong enough to survive a fall. Steel is cheap. Mass production would drive costs down -- how many students are there? tens of millions.
... lawsuits from publishers?
Laptops are simply Microsoft and Intel's way of locking in customers forever. eBooks do not need a bloody laptop. I'd imagine the publishers love the new hardware DRM being built into the laptops' chipsets by Intel.
Why isn't someone building a cheap, useful ebook?
(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.
Well, the solution is to create an honest-to-god ebook solution: a hundred dollar lcd non-backlit cheapo unit, like a larger palm, the size of a piece of notebook paper, with an ethernet jack for transfering files in and out of non-volatile memory. It should run on AAA cells. It should be strong enough to survive a fall. Steel is cheap. Mass production would drive costs down -- how many students are there? tens of millions.
... lawsuits from publishers?
:-) ).
Why isn't someone building a cheap, useful ebook?
If you can make it work, go ahead. People have been trying to make a viable electronic book for the past twenty years.
From what I remember of the failed attempts: PDAs and notebooks in 1995 sold many "ruggedized" variants: the kind that could stand a (single) three foot drop onto concrete, or partial or total immersion in water. These versions tended to be four to five times the cost of a "non-ruggedized" version.
The cost of steel wasn't the limiting factor; shock resistant hard drives tended to be, though. Weight was also a limiting factor; by using titanium instead of steel, Palm is able to cut the weight of their cases in half (plus make them look cooler
It's a non-trivial task to design a viewing system that
(a) is dirt cheap,
(b) looks good in multiple lighting conditions,
(c) is damage resistant.
You want "cheap" and "good" at the same time? Well, then, like the engineering rule says, you've ruled out "fast". Prepare to wait a long time to get what you want. I should know: I've wanted a decent pda/electronic paper solution for 20 years now. Palm pilots are the closest I've seen yet, and they've got a long way to go...
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AC