Quote:
Originally Posted by witeowl
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.
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I agree with your points but in my school, getting the kids near even a 10 year old computer is nigh-on impossible, I don't see us being able to afford so many e-readers or tablets. It would also introduce issues of where/who charges them, theft, messing about on them etc.
Our school spends very little on textbooks as class sets are expected to last 10-years + and we don't provide individual books. I believe many schools in England are in a similar position and the cost of buying 1000 odd e-readers plus licenses for at least 8 different year-group sets of textbooks in my subject alone would make e-textbooks currently unaffordable. Textbooks are also cheaper to replace than an e-reader/tablet should it get dropped, thrown etc.
By flexibility I was thinking of things such as flipping between different pages, using multiple textbooks, sharing textbooks (possible but with current screen sizes a pain), the display size on e-readers and quality of PDFs is variable and taking textbooks outside (though I guess this would be possible with e-readers).