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.

Umm... vision?

[JossiRossi]

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.

meanwhile, in kansas...

[avi33]

Plans are underway to do away with all science books except for one.

You've got to be kidding.

[pudding7]

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.

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.

Racket!

[pin_gween]

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.