Empire High School is one of a band of schools which is taking computer technology out of the classroom and into students’ bags.
Calvin Baker, chief superintendent of the Vail School district, told BBC World Service programme Go Digital that it has not signalled the total demise of text books.
“There are no text books other than a couple on the shelf for teachers to use as resource,” he explains.
“We still have a library – we are not anti-books. We have a library and we encourage students to use it, but the primary delivery of instruction materials is being done through the laptops.”
Providing all the pupils with Apple iBooks did not dent the school’s budget as much as might be expected. But part of that is down to the school having been newly built.
The money that was budgeted to buy text books, which was about $500 a student, was spent instead on the laptops.
“Our laptops cost is about $800 per pupil. Our net cost is probably $100 to $200 more than if we had used text books,” he says.
By giving all the students a laptop computer, the school has done away with computer laboratories too.
“Some classes are relying primarily on a service, where you need a password to get to it. Some classes’ teachers are using electronic text books as a resource – not as a primary tool but as a resource and then a lot of our classes are relying very heavily on simply free material that is available on the internet.”
One of the big advantages to this approach, he says, is that teachers have a lot more opportunity to choose material that is particularly relevant to that subject.
“When you are using or selecting a text book, it is an all or nothing package. The beauty of the internet is that it allows teachers for every unit to go out and pick the material that they believe is absolutely relevant for that particular topic.”
But providing every student with their own valuable bit of kit such as a laptop might be seen as risky by some. Mr Baker thinks that by allowing the pupils to keep their music on the machines has meant they see the technology in a different way.
“That’s a very valuable part of their life, and that is where their collection is, and so they take pretty good care of it just because it is something that is personally important to them.”
You hope that knowledge and access to information becomes as valuable as their tunes.
FINALLY! Someone gets it.
In Canada, we’re facing double digit tuition increases and still student have to purchase books and study material which is the biggest waste of resources since plastic pop bottles!
I think that students should get a laptop in grade nine (first year of high school in Canada) and ALL their books and study material in electronic form. WITHOUT any bullshit DRM. I think it would save MILLIONS over the four years of high school and the same thing should be done at the post-secondary level.
First year of college or university… the student gets a laptop and all the books and study material pre-installed with Mozilla, OpenOffice, etc.
The book publishers and their lobbyists will be out in full force to kill this idea before it takes root!
Here’s a related story about how college book are starting to be sold via DRM infested e-books to students. You get a 33% discount but you are not able to resell it. And even worse, it stops working after the class is done.
How long do you think the “discount” will last? My guess is once most class books are so that way, the price will go up to 100%. Heck, I’d guess the price will go even higher.
Hurray!!!
I bet few people have thought about the huge amount of trees that are cut to produce paper and books every school year. How wonderful it would be if every school in the world would turn this way. Nature would be very grateful, indeed. One laptop can be used for years and replace lots of books and lots of paper notebooks.
Even if ecology wasn’t the primary reason, the ecological benefit of this approach is wonderful. So, hurray!!!
I just wish this spreads all over the planet. My spine is skewed because of the heavy books I had to carry to school every day when I was young. If I can save my kids from that I will pay how many laptops it’s necessary…
Oops, I forgot to include the link to the story relating to DRM infested college e-books.
http://news.zdnet.com/2100-9588_22-5825301.html
Schools spend far too much time focusing on technology. You don’t need computers in any class unless it’s a computer class. The textbooks are only a problem because they are buying the wrong ones, with hundreds of pages of pictures.
I still have my college textbooks in engineering and math as part of my library. I suspect many others do also. No way I would want an electronic book that can’t be read after a fixed time period.
What has surprises me is how few electronic books take advantage of the medium. You’d think computer guys would be smart about this but they rarely are. They just output their manuals into PDF and think that’s fine. But it can be almost unreadable if they use multiple columns, small fonts, etc.
For starters, when are manual writers going to notice that the printed page is “portrait” but the computer screen is “landscape” ?
Computers won’t help learning; high standards will help. Expecting students to learn and grading according to performance encourages students to learn, not more laptops and e-books.
Let’s face it, in the past 50 years little has changed in terms of necessary knowledge for highschool graduation, yet the standards and performance have dropped precipitously. There are no science, higher math, arts or any other requirements for graduation, except for maybe a couple of english, history and political science classes.
We have teachers that don’t know how to teach, parents that don’t demand anything from their children, administrators that couldn’t care less about their students (just their jobs), and a textbook mafia that makes most textbooks cost 5 to 10 times what they should actually cost.
You want students to learn? Bring back discipline and set higher standards. Stop wasting money on e-books and fancy computers and start spending money on teaching students to think.
Start by removing ineffective teachers and administrators. If a school can not meet standards, it is because those in charge are inept, and no amount of e-books is going to help. Require teacher certification, just like in nursing. Grade teachers according to student performance. Hold those in charge accountable for the performance of those that work for them (the students).
Students perform well under good leadership; but them in a bad learning environment and tehy will perform accordingly, no matter how much you spend on stupid e-books.
although computers may have a place to augment learning, books are much better because of their “here and now” feel it with your hands value. Textbooks should not be replaced by computer text. Period!
The textbooks for the lower grades are especially awful, and have too many “politically correct” photos of the required handicapped, asian, black, hispanic, and, occasionally, white child, and the awful illustrations can be done away with, and the “free format” page layouts can be done away with, and, certainly the shallow text, simplified for child’s minds is a PROBLEM. Computers are great for research. They’re good for adding to a subject. They can be great for rote drills and for moving illustrations.
However, there is still nothing like the smell and feel of a good textbook.
(Oh, and we’re homeschoolers…we use high school and college text books—ONLY—as the grammar school text books are a waste of money. Kids can grasp complex ideas, if you give them a chance to.)
Awake, most states have teacher certification, and it makes things worse. Qualified teachers aren’t willing to go through the extra education school licensing, and you end up with most teachers being in the bottom third of college graduates.