http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20050711/ap_on_hi_te/no_textbooks Arizona School Will Not Use Textbooks Mon Jul 11, 7:26 AM ET TUCSON, Ariz. - 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. ...man, I feel old now. I guess the big delima now becomes whether to delete Half Life 2 or some p*rn to make room for that term paper on the Civil War...
Plainly STUPID. these kids will lose their eyesight by the time they reach 11th grade from staring at the laptop. THIS thread's title should be "This country is going to hell".
How do you figure? We look at computer screens all day long. I think its great that some places are finally getting away from using so much paper products. The possibilities for things like this are limitless. The hardware would cost money but I bet the software licenses are going to be a chunk of change as well. Not to mention supporting the machines and software distribution. Holy crap I would love to be on a project like that.
What a great idea! When you consider the fact that you can get a laptop for $500 and text books go for $30-$100 each. And I'm sure the price could be negotiated down for a learning institution plus you would be buying in bulk. You eliminate the cost of paper and pencils. Tests can be done online and graded instantly. Homework and lesson plans can be downloaded from home when your sick. Automatic increase in computer literacy. Easy translation to other languages for students new to english. Not to mention new texts can be downloaded reducing shipping costs. There is the back end support costs but I would think it would all even out in the end and the pluses for the students and staff would be pretty high in my opinion.
I like the idea. Textbooks are such a pain, especially in pre-college education. I remember if you lost a book you had to pay for it, and $100+ is expensive for a jr. high or high school kid. If you didn't lose it the book still had to get inspected and you had to pay for whatever damage was inflicted upon it. Man, I wish they had this stuff back in my day.
This might be a small problem, but I would think that just like books the students would be financially responsible for their return.
No More Pencils... No More Books... No More Teachers' Dirty Looks... I don't think this is quite what Alice had in mind....
we had this in our schools 4 years ago... henrico public schools, look em up. we got brand new ibooks with wireless technology...
OK, I'll bite...I had lunch over an hour and a half ago, so it should be ok... :::deep breath::: What exactly is the "3 shells"?
