Arizona School Gets Rid Of Textbooks
By Justin Gardner | Related entries in TechnologyFrom the AP:
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.
However, it’s not exactly cost effective.
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.
You know what? Who cares about a little extra cost. A laptop is a tool. A book is a reference material. These kids will be able to do tons more things with a laptop than a book.
I can’t wait to see if this works out!
This entry was posted on Monday, July 11th, 2005 and is filed under Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
May 21st, 2008 at 10:45 am
Dude, reference materials are tools too.
Kids COULD do lots of extra cool things on computers. But mostly, they won’t. Not anytime soon. They’ll just read reference material on a computer screen instead of on paper.
Oh, and don’t forget there’s also the matter of paying to license all the software and reference materials. The computers don’t come with content. And don’t forget that books last longer and are far more durable than laptops.
I can’t wait for more school districts to try this out so we can see how much of the school budget is eaten up by the per-student costs for hardware+software+tech support. All you “damn the cost computers are awesome” folks are in for a seriously rude awakening. When school budget costs go WAY up and test scores do NOT, don’t act all surprised or defensive.