Arizona School Won't Use Textbooks 491
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."
Finally! (Score:3, Insightful)
Racket! (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Racket! (Score:3, Informative)
In fact, I can't ever remember having a book that lasted only 1 year.
There was the student name panel on the inside of the front cover where the current student had to write his/her name and teacher.
There were kids who got the same books that their older siblings used that were 2 to 4 years older.
Re:Racket! (Score:5, Insightful)
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?
Re:Racket! (Score:3, Insightful)
Why isn't someone building a cheap, useful ebook?
If
Re:Racket! (Score:4, Interesting)
why are you comparing book prices to laptop prices (Score:3, Insightful)
Just buying the laptop doesn't mean the textbooks will be free. You still need to pay for electronic copies of the textbooks as well.
Re:why are you comparing book prices to laptop pri (Score:3, Insightful)
Here's tThe part that gets me:
the move to electronic materials gets teachers away from the habit of simply marching through a textbook each year.
Like hell. Uninspired teachers who simply trudge through a curriculum, or essentially read the textbook to the students,
Re:I remember reading.. (Score:3, Insightful)
As of late, I thought it had been fairly well established that technology does nothing to help students learn more, or learn better. When I see stories like this, it makes me wonder which crony's friend/relative is getting the contract.
Re:Another problem (Score:3, Insightful)
If the laptops are issued by the school there is no expectation of privacy. The schools would also probably have the parents sign a waiver.
Re:Another problem (Score:3, Interesting)
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 some
Re:Another problem (Score:3, Interesting)
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 a
Re:Racket! (Score:3, Insightful)
$500 a month is half a month's pay to some people.
- A.P.
The Dog (Score:5, Funny)
Laptop school (Score:3, Interesting)
Their school motto: (Score:2, Funny)
"Staring into a computer screen is like staring into an eclipse. It's brilliant and you don't realize the damage until its too late"
What's wrong with textbooks? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:What's wrong with textbooks? (Score:3, Funny)
The previous slashdot post contains material on teaching. Teaching is a theory, not a fact, regarding the origin of knowledge. This material should be approached with an open mind, studied carefully, and critically considered.
Re:What's wrong with textbooks? (Score:2)
The laptops cost $850 each, and the district will hand them to 350 Empire High School students for the entire year. in California, i'm strongly concidering quitting a high-paying job at a major defense firm to go be a lazy-ass administrator pulling down over 6 figures in the Los Angeles or surrounding area school districts. These people make shitloads of money, and all they have to do is constantly keep the comput
Re:What's wrong with textbooks? (Score:2)
Re:What's wrong with textbooks? (Score:3, Funny)
What firm? It sounds as if they need qualified people...
Re:What's wrong with textbooks? (Score:2)
Re:What's wrong with textbooks? (Score:5, Insightful)
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."
Re:What's wrong with textbooks? (Score:2, Redundant)
Re:What's wrong with textbooks? (Score:4, Insightful)
Possibly. But the bad teacher will presumably still be better than they were before the training, so the quality of education provided to students will improve. Does putting tech into the classroom actually improve the quality of education, or is it simply change for the sake of change?
Even if we put money in to raising teacher salaries, hoping to attract better teachers away from other careers, won't we also attract a lot of bad teachers looking for a relatively easy buck?
The point of raising teacher salaries is to make replacing the current crop of bad teachers with good teachers feasible, by increasing the pool of potential teachers. If there are few or no good teachers available, you have little choice but to hire bad teachers in order to fill your staffing requirements. With more candidates to choose from, you can choose to hire only the good ones.
Re:What's wrong with textbooks? (Score:3, Insightful)
I teach English at a public high school. I graduated Summa Cum Laude with a 3.8 GPA, Dean's List, glowing marks during internships, etc. All the things a major employer would look for in a prospective employee who had just graduated. I am an exception in public education.
Don't get me wrong, I work with brilliant people, many
Re:What's wrong with textbooks? (Score:5, Insightful)
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? (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:What's wrong with textbooks? (Score:5, Insightful)
Incidentally, union memebership is totally optional in most districts.
Re:What's wrong with textbooks? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:What's wrong with textbooks? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Right tool the right purpose (Score:3, Insightful)
As for using the Internet, your teacher can still print texts from the Internet and give them as handouts to students. Laptops wouldn't be needed.
If you just throw the students onto the internet, you'll get papers detailing th
Didn't you know? (Score:3, Funny)
Umm... vision? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Umm... vision? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Umm... vision? (Score:2)
Re:Umm... vision? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Umm... vision? (Score:2)
I find it curious that you consider this to be a "downside."
Costs are brutal! (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Costs are brutal! (Score:3, Insightful)
Hack the server with the "text book" stored on?
Re:Costs are brutal! (Score:2)
meanwhile, in kansas... (Score:5, Funny)
No Match for books. (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:No Match for books. (Score:2)
Re:No Match for books. (Score:2)
I gotta agree. Interesting experiment, but I'm glad they're not experimenting on me or anyone in my family. The technology just isn't there for e-books. It's quite often that I'm at work and run across some information which doesn't quite make sense and what do I do? I print it out so I can pore over it more closely. Maybe it's just the way I was brought up, and kids today have learned to do things the e-way, but I'm sure it's at least in part the tangible benefits of paper.
The cost will likely be qui
EPaper (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:EPaper (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm sure they'll still charge $200, only now it will be for a 1 year license rather than this year's edition.
Re:EPaper (Score:2)
Re:EPaper (Score:3, Insightful)
Most students never figured out that the texts books were available to be checked out. Library late fees are a joke compared to the cost of buying the books.
Re:EPaper (Score:2)
You've got to be kidding. (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Don't you remember book covers? (Score:2, Interesting)
Well, I do.
Privacy concerns?? (Score:5, Interesting)
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?
More wifi for me! (Score:2, Funny)
Lack of vision not enought hind sight (Score:2, Informative)
1) What happens if you have internet connectivity issue before a test (night before).
2) What happens when a web link gets out dated and you cannot reference it during your studies.
3) Viruses and worms do bad things.
4) Managing the secuirty on the laptops.
5) File corruption.
Well, all the problems listed above can actually prepare a student for the real world in an office built around MS technology.
My deepest fear: text changing on the fly (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:My deepest fear: text changing on the fly (Score:5, Insightful)
Tin foil hat on
Anyone who has ever read 1984 [wikipedia.org] 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
Re:My deepest fear: text changing on the fly (Score:3, Insightful)
Think:
Government schools, who cannot teach and indeed have no interest in teaching basic literacy, are buying laptop computers to hand out to the kids.
What do I make of this? It is another distraction intended to waylay semi-literate parents of these public school inmates into thinking it will somehow foster education in some vague... **insert stream of government/corporate obfus
Re:My deepest fear: text changing on the fly (Score:5, Informative)
As soon as a book can (untraceably) be edited much objectivity is lost.
This is already happening, and it is indeed scary.
They just don't quite have the untraceable part down yet.
About a decade ago, Time Magazine published an essay by Bush Sr and Secretary of Defense Scowcroft on why they chose not take out Sadam during the first gulf war. A lot of the points they made have been proven true today.
Time DELETED the article from their online archives. It was as if it were never written, URLs that once worked are now road-kill on the information super-highway. Not only that, but significant changes were made to other articles in that same issues as compared to the print version.
Fortunately it wasn't quite so untraceable and has been widely reported (not widely enough IMNHO). Here is one take on the story, you can find plenty more by googling for bush scowcroft "reasons not to invade".
http://eee.uci.edu/programs/comp/39c/google/heske
hmmm...problems (Score:2)
If you had asked me (Score:3, Informative)
The future of learning is in information being availible everywhere. This school will prove it.
Alter-universe (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Look out for... (Score:3, Funny)
Textbook Publishers Association of America. Yeah, I made it up, but we simply cannot allow for progress against an old business models. Trifles innovation, hurts the authors, and leaves the suits worried.
what a dumb idea (Score:3, Insightful)
English classes should use paper for literature (Score:2, Insightful)
However, when it comes to plain old literature, like Shakespear's works, paper-in-hand is a much more pleasing experience than laptop-on-lap.
Sure, have annotated, hyperlinked copies of Romeo and Juliet on the computer, but for goodness sake give those kids an actual book to read if they want one.
Re:English classes should use paper for literature (Score:2)
I agree! One of my favorite things is to grab a paperback and go out under a tree to read on a nice warm day. If everything changes to an e-text, exactly at what tree can a laptop be plugged in?
And the feel of a book in my hands feels good. It is not to heavy to lift over my head, to lean back and read. I like the feel of flipping pages. With a laptop, my head w
Change the way we teach (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:Change the way we teach (Score:3, Insightful)
I didn't want to get too far into it, but movies are actually a better choice. Yes, it's poetry, and yes, it's meant to be heard, but Shakespeare has a visual component, too.
Again, the styles age badly, but there are recent films that I would recommend to a teenage audience: Branagh's Henry V and Much Ado; Mel Gibson as Hamlet; the
And with VoIP and cameras... (Score:3, Funny)
I've a bad feeling about this. (Score:5, Insightful)
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:I've a bad feeling about this. (Score:2)
Need Paper (Score:2, Insightful)
What about Content? (Score:3, Insightful)
Computers Degrade Academic Performance (Score:3, Interesting)
Wikipedia (Score:2)
Horrible Idea... (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Horrible Idea... (Score:3, Insightful)
Read current textbooks much? You hardly need computers for such historical revisionism.
(Of course, while the 'right wing' efforts, mostly unsuccessful at that, of some people to get ID into textbooks and E
Huge Mistake (Score:2, Insightful)
Info on Vail (Score:2)
Re:Info on Vail (Score:2)
Where is the content coming from? (Score:3, Interesting)
Reasons not to. (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Not a good thing (Score:2, Insightful)
I'm sorry, I think this is a lousy idea. Other people have commented about the dangers of giving a schoolful of kids expensive laptops, but there's something else: it SUCKS to read tons of text on a screen.
I (obviously) like computers, and I read tons of technical documentation online, since it's usually extremely interconnected, and hyperlinks help. But if I'm reading something that's pretty much linear (TFA didn't mention the structure of these "online articles", so I may be wrong there), or w
eye problems (Score:2)
This is a pretty bad idea that stems from the belief that you can throw technology at a problem and fix it. In this case, give the kids laptops and they'll get smarter. Don't get me wrong, laptops/computers/other technologies used in conjunction with other tools is a good idea. I'd suggest using the right tool for the job which would result in a helpful exposure to a variety of
learning tools- be it book or notebook.
This is a terrible idea (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Hidden costs (Score:2)
Are the eBooks free? I *highly* doubt it. So it's more like $850 for the laptop + $400 (or more!) for the eTexts from Scholastic of whoever.
Plus you gotta add in support costs (how much support do you have to do on a hunk of dead tree?), and a 1-2 year lifecycle (if you're *lucky*), vs. a 5-7 year life cycle for books. And now, if you drop/break/destroy/steal/loose a laptop, you don't just loose that Chemistry text book, but also that students entire course
Too Bad in Some Ways (Score:2)
They need E-ink (Score:2)
E-ink [eink.com] is one way around the screen problem. Basically, it is electronically controlled paper.
an ebook sounds like a MUCH better solution. (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Students hate electronic books. (Score:5, Interesting)
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!)
Re:Vail is in Colorado! (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Vail is in Colorado! (Score:2)
Re:Go Arizona! (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Great (Score:2)
you'll notice the inherent benefits of ebooks, such as quick searching, hyperlinks to related articles, etc.
These will also be the greatest distractions to the kids.
Re:Mistake (Score:2)
Excellent...I'd like to read more (electronically). Care to provide a link to not only inform us but also backup your claim?
Re:Mistake (Score:2)
Where has it been proven that kids learn better from books than computers? I'm not terribly surprised to hear it, but where are the tests and study results that proove it?
Re:about time (Score:3, Insightful)
Why?
There isn't really any advantage in learning from a computer. In fact, most people won't like it as much because physical books are easier to read. If you don't understand something it is much easier to read and reread a text book than to read and reread a PDF document. The article only mentions that they don't want teachers teaching straight from textbooks anymore. I'm not sure what is stopping them teaching straight from the computer mate
Re:Laptop Vs Books cost (Score:2)
This was one of those things I always wanted to do if I won a truckload of money in a lottery. Hire some qualified people to write textbooks in subjects that don't change a lot and own all the rights. Then, make them freely available to all comers in electronic version.
-Charles
Re:MAC or PC (Score:2)
Re:Let us hope not all schools do this... (Score:2)
In my primary school, there were two sisters who, IIRC, belonged to the Plymouth Brethren [wikipedia.org]. Any time we watched a video, which wasn't too common in primary school but was still an enjoyable distraction, they had to 'ceremoniously' leave the room. They also wore headscarves at all times.
Like you said, such considerations would be on a small scale but it would be interesting to see the guidelines for such cases. I expect that they can currently swap computer classes for others, bu