Don’t be surprised if the next time your kid or your neighbour’s kid tells you that he won’t be having any text-books this year at school!! š
Empire High School in Arizona, USA, issued iBooks to each of its 340 students this year, becoming one of the first US public schools to do away with printed text-books. This is incidently the schools inagural year & the officals believe that students will be more engaged in learning with electronic texts, reports Yahoo! News. But Empire High isn’t the first or only one to have replaced printed text-books with laptops, students of 23 middle & high schools in Henrico County(near Richmond) have been using laptops for 4 years now!!
Many publishers have started offering the digital versions of the printed text-books & students download the study material over the school’s wireless network. But there are censors in place to restrict what students have access to on internet, including the chat rooms & instant messengers. The homework can be submitted online as well and a program will check it against the work of other students to catch the smart-kids who copy the work of their buddies!! Uhh oh, hi-tech ain’t always cool, it was much easier to copy your pal’s work & submit either much before him or a bit later than him to pass undetected, but not now!! š
But the school is trying to fully benefit from this shift and now the curriculum can contain links to more detailed/authoritative information on other websites for any or every subject, thus allowing students to get a detailed & broader view easily!!
I don’t doubt that this system will rapidly spread among other schools & before long we’ll have our own kids studying via a laptop!! š I think it’ll be quite amusing to tell our grand-children that we studied from text-books printed on paper!! š