EBooks for School Books!

The Educator

I have recently taking a large intrest in this area! Where students would ditch there paper books and copies and buy laptops and ebooks!

How many of you think it would be a great idea?

angelstar11

u stole my idea:mad: ...hehe...jk yes its a great idea:D

Colm!

I hate to be the one to ask, but what would we gain from all this?

spurious

A puck in the gob on your way home if the local flora know there are lappers in the bags.

The Educator

Yes, but if you would do this, it would have many factors e.g.

Save money on family in times of rough in environment (copies, stationary etc.)
Help the environment with less tress being used to make school books
Saving chilldrens backs with the weight of bag
And finally one more step closer to having a more efficent education system!

A puck in the gob on your way home if the local flora know there are lappers in the bags.

I wouldnt exactly advise anyone to be walking around willy nilly if there are "local flora" attempting to take your personal belongings!

spurious

The Educator wrote: »

I wouldnt exactly advise anyone to be walking around willy nilly if there are "local flora" attempting to take your personal belongings!

Seriously though, we've already started on the road with these. Not so much on laptops, because of security issues, but we have lots of materials on the school's Moodle, so books can be left out of the equation. The weight of them alone is a reason to only buy class sets, rather than individual copies.

The constant stream of 'new and improved' books from the publishers is a right con too.

emo72

good thread. the only reason the kids are not using kindles and ebooks is protectionism. this is a major farce and i cant believe this is not being challenged.

there is absolutely no good reason why we retain the printed books.

Desire.

Our school has just got overhead projectors installed in every classroom, and we know work from the projector for Woodwork. I believe Edco have digital versions of all their books on EdcoDigital -- they have powerpoints for each chapter in Woodwork anyway.

It's a nice change from the books.

thesimpsons

as parent of teenagers I'm in two minds about this. The weight of bags and the volumes of books which need to be transported between school and home is excessive. However, I find it very hard to read and fully take in technical issues from computerised screens. I'll read an ebook for leisure no problem but for actual learning and understanding, I find I usually have to print off info and generally sit with pen in hand and underline or highlight stuff. I know my child in LC does the same thing when she is researching history/geog info on the net for school she'll print off the stuff even if its going to be shreadded soon after she's finished with it.

My own preference would be that in the schools they only use ebook text books and projectors or whiteboards but that in the home, the students would have access to both forms. The constant revised issues which publishers bring out would become redundant if teachers wouldn't constantly insist on the new revised versions being used.

When I was in school, teacher would just say read " chapter x on yyyyy " or whatever chapter it is in your own version. There was never any problems with someone not finding out what pages they had to study. Books could be handed down in families for years - theres a 11yr gap in ages between my siblings and the same poetry/history/etc books were passed on and on. I've seen where the publishers have justified new versions of books cos the graphics need to be updated for today's computer savy generation. Thats just pure bull. Graphs and such may sometimes have to be changed but not at the expense of a whole new book. I've seen publishers move chapters around and change a few pictures to justify new versions and teachers insisting on using the new version

stephendevlin

Thought of this a couple of years ago too. You could have all your work / books on a pen drive and just plug it into a computer or even better an ebook reader like kindle. (no carrying bags or laptops)

Written work would still need to continue though. For obvious reasons

In a few years maybe e-book readers could become an option for school goers as it would make much more sense.

Publishing companies wont go for this though. Too easy to replicate it. (not that it cant be done now) But not legally.

Fo younger kids the books could be more interactive (like programs instead of ebooks) Might be a great help.

I did suggest to a work collegue to scan the books in for home use and save him from dragging the books home. Would take a while though. Bag is bigger than he is.

Desire.

thesimpsons wrote: »

I've seen where the publishers have justified new versions of books cos the graphics need to be updated for today's computer savy generation. Thats just pure bull.

It's much easier to study and learn from an attractive looking book.

spurious

I use books that I used for my Inter. Cert. (1978) with my classes. They are perfectly adequate.
I don't base my classes on textbooks anyway.

On the technology thing, we're having an iPad project with one class group next year in our school. I'm not sure a lot of the technological advances don't play into the short attention spans and desire for spoonfeeding that are unfortunately so prevalent today.