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."

Comments

What's wrong with textbooks?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:What's wrong with textbooks?

[ConceptJunkie]

Imo, this money should go towards more teacher training/more teachers.

Yeah, but mindlessly pissing money down a hole has been touted as the way to fix education for so long, hardly anyone knows how to do anything else, even though it has never worked.

Hire good teachers. This requires paying a decent salary. Dismantle the teachers' unions, which serve only themselves and are largely responsible for the horrible mess our education system is in, by locking in bad teachers and bad ideas. Hold schools accountable by allowing vouchers, which will force competition.

Based on my experience as a volunteer teacher and feedback from kids, parents and other teachers, 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 teach professionally, but I can't afford the huge pay cut and I will never take a job that requires me to join a union.

Re:What's wrong with textbooks?

[fm6]

All the money is being spent on "tech in schools"...

...is partly offset in this case by not buying all those overpriced textbooks.

Here's what's wrong with textbooks: they peddle an oversimplified, predigested, emasculated version of whatever they're trying to teach. You say the solution is better teachers? Good teachers hate textbooks. Good teachers know that the job is to teach student to do actual thinking -- a process not assisted by the unchallenging, anti-thought-provoking crap standard textbooks contain.

Teachers have been trying trying to find alternatives to textbooks for decades. Thirty-odd years ago, I had a really good high-school history class (20th century U.S.) where the teachers tossed out the textbooks and replaced them with all the serious reading they could legally photocopy. Nowadays, they would just point us at the Internet, and save a lot of time and money in the process.

Anyway, computers are an essential part of modern education. Aside from computer skills being a basic element of modern literacy, they just do a hell of lot to help with the process. If nothing else, they make writing a lot easier -- I mean jeez, no sane person does real writing by hand or typewriter any more. And writing is two thirds of a real education.

Re:What's wrong with textbooks?

[UserChrisCanter4]

I am a member of a teacher's union. I hate 98% of what they stand for. But $130/year gets me $6 million in liability coverage. When some kid decides to sue for bad grades, sue for "mistreatment" while being taken to the disciplinary office, or accuse me of "touching them" because I failed them, I need that. It happens more frequently than a lot of people would care to imagine, especially the first example. So while I disagree with the teacher's union on a lot of things, I can't afford to take the chance. I'm going to have to have that same kind of coverage from the state before I give up my union membership.

Incidentally, union memebership is totally optional in most districts.

Re:What's wrong with textbooks?

[lucifuge31337]

i'm convinced that most IT people don't understand the point of their job - provide service to their users so that their users can get their shit done. That means, if you have to research something you don't know (how to get Macs to connect to SMB shares) then get off your fat ass and find out how!!!! Then help your user!

Having gone through this at the grunt level as well as the management level, I can say that you are 110% correct. Most IT people, especially "paper mill" MCSE's really don't know whay they are . They often seem to think that the network/technology/whatever drives the business, rather than the other way around. With very few exceptions, that is obviously not the case, with their salaries easily in the "cost of doing business" category. This is eaxactly why so many non-techies have such a negative view of techs.

One of the worst examples I personally witnessed was an underling of mine who decided that the middle of the day, after he finished lunch, would be a good time to clean up the wiring closet. He felt no need to notify users, and seemed to not understand why this was a problem (at a web-based software development company, where 90% of the employees were testing code on machines that they damn well needed the network to get to).

And one more: A software developer at at a different job who I assigned to write a piece of software (almost....nothing more than an Access app) to assist in expediting a daily paperwork nightmare (ACH to/from several accounts....all source destination information already available electronically). I told him to go sit down with the girl who did it and lear how she does her job and exactly what she needed. His response was "I don't need to know how to do her job to write that." My response was, "See that door? Don't let it hit you in the ass on the way out."

My deepest fear: text changing on the fly

[Lead Butthead]

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.

Re:My deepest fear: text changing on the fly

[Meshach]

That is actually a very good point

Tin foil hat on

Anyone who has ever read 1984 knows that this is one of the hallmarks of a controlled society. As soon as a book can (untraceably) be edited much objectivity is lost

Hat off

This is a good money saving idea. And it will save paper and make it easier to do homework from home

I am torn

I've a bad feeling about this.

[Linker3000]

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!

Re:Racket!

[Catbeller]

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.

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? ... lawsuits from publishers?