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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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!?
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.
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.
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.
"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."
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
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.
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...
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.
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
(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.
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.