Quote:
Originally Posted by Tome Keeper
As a high school teacher I would have to say no. E-books do not provide enough flexibility for the classroom, nor do we have the money to buy e-readers.
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Interesting... As a middle school teacher, I would have to say yes. BUT, this is with my personal interpretation that the ereader be a tablet device capable of running apps (a certain fruity company is really pushing hard for this movement, and I'm in support, minus the device specificity). This is also predicated on my (naively idealistic) assumption that licenses for digital textbooks would be sold at a slightly lower price than physical textbooks.
If you think about how much schools spend in in providing a book per student for at least four different subjects, with at least one new textbook adoption every other year (causing so many textbooks to be needlessly replaced) I think that a multi-function device/ereader would quickly hit the break-even point, particularly if the school could become semi-paperless (imagine the savings in lined paper, copied worksheets, and copy-machine maintenance).*
Regarding flexibility, I'm a bit confused. Students cannot annotate or highlight a textbook, but they could do that with an ereader. I'd consider that to be much more flexible.
I would give a figurative right arm to have our school adopt a 1:1 tablet/ereader initiative. The only things I suspect stopping it (our principal is quite forward-thinking) are the initial investment and the availability of district-adopted textbooks in digital formats (only 50% are currently available as such).
* I look forward to the day when we laugh about copy machines in school as hard as we currently laugh about ditto machines.