Posted on 07/11/2005 8:53:06 AM PDT by freepatriot32
TUCSON, Ariz. (July 11) - 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.
Vail Unified School District's decision to go with an all-electronic school is rare, experts say. Often, cost, insecurity, ignorance and institutional constraints prevent schools from making the leap away from paper.
''The efforts are very sporadic,'' said Mark Schneiderman, director of education policy for the Software and Information Industry Association. ''A minority of communities are doing a good or very good job, but a large number are just not there on a number of levels.''
Calvin Baker, superintendent of Vail Unified School District, said the move to electronic materials gets teachers away from the habit of simply marching through a textbook each year.
He noted that the AIMS test now makes the state standards the curriculum, not textbooks. Arizona students will soon need to pass Arizona's Instrument to Measure Standards to graduate from high school.
But the move to laptops is not cheap. The laptops cost $850 each, and the district will hand them to 350 students for the entire year. The fast-growing district hopes to have 750 students at the high school eventually.
A set of textbooks runs about $500 to $600, Baker said.
It's not clear how the change to laptops will work, he conceded.
''I'm sure there are going to be some adjustments. But we visited other schools using laptops. And at the schools with laptops, students were just more engaged than at non-laptop schools,'' he said.
The issue is, the book publishing companies won't be able to run their little racket anymore if this catches on.
Most textbook companies have big online presences too. They would probably start some subscription service for accessing academic content. I have seen some sites do that already.
Uhh... the same thing that happens if they sell their textbooks for drugs, booze, or sneakers?
I wonder if a bunch of nerds have ever gotten into a gangfight.
I kind of agree with this. Textbooks may be going the way of the spool-film projector.
I kind of agree with this. Textbooks may be going the way of the spool-film projector.
They are getting scarce in the younger grades.
Same for me. (But he was still alive at the time...)
'-)
Aha! It paid to read thru the thread before posting! This was my thought exactly. College libraries are already having a terrible time keeping up with the costs of licensing online products while trying to maintain a physical collection. I don't know how a high school is going to do it over the long haul.
The demand for online materials is growing, but it is a nasty habit. If you purchase the physical journal for the library, it's there practically forever. If you purchase a journal in Yr 1, but don't pay for it in Yr 2, you still have the Yr 1 issues sitting on the shelf. If you license access to the online version, once you stop paying the license, you no longer have access to the journal, even the years for which you previously paid.
I don't know what types of material this school will be accessing, but I bet they have to pay a fee for it and at some point, some hard choices are going to have to be made.
...not to mention that a group of children are being used as guinea pigs. The kids in the study groups don't get to RE-DO school if this doesn't work.
In California, the state is selecting which texts can be used. This is quite a departure.
Just got your book yesterday.
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