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Save the Trees
Are we ready yet? Do we have the technology to let go of paper text books? I’m thinking a lot about this as the HS math department at my current school, which is phasing in a 1-1 laptop program, is putting together our orders for the next school year. Should the paper text books be filed away in the artifacts cabinet and be replaced by slick new i-texts, iBooks or digital books or whatever they are called?
Scrolling through a few known math bloggers ideas, I’m seeing several sides to this dilemma. Dan Mayer in a recent blog post, It’s Called iBooks Author, Not iMath Textboks Author, And the Trouble that Results sees them as more of the same just in lighter weight package. He takes aim at math text book companies being out of touch with what inspires learning in the average student. He was hoping that with the invent of iTexts, textbooks would make a leap and stop spoon feeding students the information limiting their creativity.
David Wee’s analysis’s the Apple iPad Text in his blog the 21st century educator. He sees many benefits to schools that can afford them, such as having the ability to subscribe to multiple textbook publishing companies through the same system. Wees however, remains skeptical and, like Meyer, thinks that other than decreasing the weight of students back-packs, these electronic text books are more of the same and that text book authors and publishing companies are not taking advantage of this new platform to fix some of the pedagogical problems in traditional textbooks.
For several years now many of my IB math students have loaded the CD version of our current text onto their computers and have become accustom to looking at their screens for their daily skills practice and explorations. It will not be a major step for them to ” save the trees” and get rid of the paper books all together. I, despite several math bloggers hesitations, am excited about interactive e-text books. I look forward to the day very soon when our students’ back packs get a little lighter.
I have been doing the 1to1 laptop program for about a year and a half. While the paper textbooks have some slight benefit if I give the students reading, I just can’t justify having these giant tomes shoved aside in a drawer somewhere. I personally use the electronic copies for creating my lesson plans, but when I think about all of the pages of extra stuff in there that I will never look at, it makes me pretty queasy about all of the waste.
On top of that, there are more and more online samples and programs and things that are just more interesting than the presentation in textbooks. I’m just hopeful that we will soon have computer screens that are as easy to read as a regular book. I’m looking forward to the day when textbooks are obsolete.
The argument to go e is compelling and in the near future it will definitely be the way to go. However in my book:-)there still remains one blot on the landscape; Tech problems. When all systems and programs interact reliably with each other and quick, efficient tech support is on hand to help solve problems it’s a green light.
Take our recent two weeks of e learning, I was surprised at the number of genuine tech issues there were (and also the number of excuses used i.e it wouldn’t open) as to why work was not completed.
Only yesterday I was trying to use Gizmo, after ‘wasting’ updated etc etc it wouldn’t work on firefox only chrome, go figure………and it would only load on some of my computers in class. For me to structure my lessons & homework on this would be a risky strategy at the moment.
Dan- enjoyed your blog, something I have been thinking a bit about in the last couple of months having recently purchased set of big expensive geography textbooks and the accompanying CD- all students have both- I conducted a little survey today in my class about this and of the 10 students 8 still prefer to use the book over the CD at home- Easier to flip between sections, see what’s ahead of them and lack of distractions when working from the book were reasons given.
Watching this clip though I don’t think that will be the case for much longer
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kQnJll4p1QU
I think I should add for clarity that I currently think both option together work best; an e book and a different book as a hard copy as we have in Science. This gives students more sources and covers different learning styles.
Harvey’s survey makes interesting food for thought, how about offering students their preferred choice? In my quick poll, ten out of 17 grade 9′s went for the book and 10 out of 12 grade 11′s! I must say I am very surprised by these number but I do see the direction e books are moving in, ie increasingly creative interactive options, will definitely capture student’s attention.