From a CNN article today:
Students at Empire High School (AZ) here started class this year with no textbooks — but it wasn’t because of a funding crisis. Instead, the school issued iBooks — laptop computers by Apple Computer Inc. — to each of its 340 students, becoming one of the first U.S. public schools to shun printed textbooks…. The school isn’t entirely paperless, however. It has a library, and students are often assigned outside reading.
Just think, in the future, schoolbook depositories will be obsolete. And if the School Board votes for a change in textbook content, they can wipe out those pesky chapters on evolution with the click of a button! Plus, with more DRM in ebooks, what becomes of right to read?
information literacy
From the CNN article: “One of the more surprising things, he said, was finding that students’ proficiency at video games and e-mail hasn’t always translated into other computer skills.”
Can you say, “no information literacy skills,” ten times fast? How many of these kids can evaluate websites, tell you who wrote what they are reading? Not many, I bet.
And I bet they spend a great deal of time in each class with technical issues, things like learning how to print out PDFs, how to make Word put a page # starting with page 2, how to print out only part of a web page, etc.