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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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
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...
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.
Remember the old lady who would scold you if she found any dogeared pages or frayed covers?
:X
Well, I do.
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
Uh,... yeah, right! The "teachers" in universities, i.e. translated to the ones that actually do the bulk of the teaching at major, four-year public (and private) institutions, don't make anywhere near $100,000. Sure, the Dean, and Assistant Deans and other higher-ups make that much money. Plus, Professors can approach and even exceed the $100K mark as well,... but they don't do this by teaching! The ones that make real money make their money from research grants and other revenue sources. These are also the profs that might teach like 1 course per year because the don't want to waste time from their research load.
Of course, there's always the little, ahem, kickback from the publisher for requiring a particular textbook of their students, but the publishing companies aren't ***that*** nice,... There's also a few profs that write their own textbook, and if the book becomes widely accepted and used at other schools, then they can make some money. But this isn't the majority of profs,...
You contradict yourself. You say teachers nee more money (I agree). You also say to kill the union. If teachers aren't making more money now *with* the union, do you really think it has a snowballs chance in hell of happening without?
And vouchers won't help schools, it will simply destroy the public school system. The real problem isn't teachers, or tech. Its parents not doing their job at home and pushing education. This occurs mainly in poorer communities- if you compare test scores and literacy rates of only middle class suburbs to private schools, the public schools meet or exceed the private schools. Thats because middle class parents understand the value of education and push their children.
So what will happen with vouchers? People will fall into 3 catagories. Catagory 1- parents who care and use the vocher. This will remove many of the higher performing students, making public schools even worse. Catagory 2- parents who don't care and don't use the voucher. No change. Catagory 3- parents who care, but still can't afford it. THey're the ones who get fucked. We now have an even more underfunded system, thats been given up on by the general public, and they have no way out. Their education level will fall even lower. The very group vouchers are touted to help are those most hurt.
The correct answer is to address the root of the problem, not the symptoms. Engage the parents, make them care about their children's education. This is not an easy task, and it doesn't have a solution in less than a decade. Too slow for most of todays knee-jerk politicians. Then increase the quality of teachers in areas such as math, science, and computers. This requires paying more, to lure them away from industry. But engage the parents first, the change has to come from there.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
Supply optional training, paid for by the district.
:-)
Then pay attention to who's taking advantage of it.
I took an education class this past year; it was paid for by the teacher's union (to which I don't belong) and I got some useful information out of it.
Only trouble was I had to actually get out of the building on time to get to class
Twenties Retirement
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...
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.
Weeks later, everyone with the Doom binary in their folder was given some sort of punishment (probably detention - I didn't get one :).
Naturally, they spend the detenion time playing Doom....
Just kidding....
Personally, in a case like this I would probably refuse to sign the waiver and offer to supply my own laptop to my child (and furthermore state that any intrusion re: the laptop would be considered unauthorized access and prosecuted to the full extent of the law). Then maybe we could negotiate something and work something out. I doubt a school would want a student carrying a laptop that they have absolutely no control over, so I am sure that we could come up with something that would be more benign.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
I may not be a lawyer, but I have noticed that the US Supreme Court has upheld freedom of speech, and other rights for minors.
The fundamental problem as I see it is that one can't try to teach a civics class where one teaches what the fourth ammendment is supposed to protect against when the entire school is set up (as a government entity, I might add) to infringe upon it.
One might argue that this is acceptable where the laptop computers are not really necessary for the student's studies, but where they are central, one is essentially stating that basic constitutional rights must be waived in order to participate in school which sets a dangerous precident. One might even argue that a private school might be given more leeway (provided that it was not supported using tax dollars) in this regard. But any government entity which sets things up so that people must waive these rights in order to participate in basic partions of a government social infrastructure is problematic to say the best.
When was the last time a school could keep a student from voicing a political opinion? Last I checked they were within their rights to say that certain things (such as beer advertisements on clothing) were not permissible, but last I checked expression of political views by a minor in a public school was still protected (i.e. a grade school student can't be disciplined because he/she wrote a paper on why it was wrong to invade Iraq, or why Bush should fire Rove).
This is not the same situation you would have in a computer lab (where monitoring would certainly not infringe on tool central to a student's studies, where there would reasonably be argued to be a compelling interest that could not be satisfied other ways, etc). But what do you do in a case where you are now monitoring everything a student does in school? Certainly that goes over the line. Is the answer to allow students to have bring laptops from home if they don't like the policy (and have laptops over which the district has *no* control, and which should they choose to look at the files without permission would cause the district to potentially be prosecuted for a felony case of computer tresspassing-- note that the laptop belongs to the parents in this case)? Or is the mere threat of that enough to force a compromise?
I certainly would be willing to try. And if they did try to read the files on my computer (as the parent) I would most certainly file charges. Especially after the previous mess with children charged with felonies for breaking into their school laptops to actually make them functional.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP