Dr. David Hopson
A number of parents and grandparents questioned me over the Labor Day Weekend (which I spent working at the Blandford Fair) about the new Apple iPads their high school students had received on the first day of school. Interestingly, the questions were wide-ranging and indicated both support for the idea and concerns about the costs to the district. I’m sure that if some individuals have these questions, others will also be interested in the answers.
If you keep up at all with educational news, particularly educational news related to technology, you’ll have seen multiple articles about electronic readers being used to replace textbooks at many locations throughout the country. As usual, Gateway’s move in this direction is barely a blip on the media screen as was the district’s support of a 1to1 laptop initiative, our policy on bring your own device (BYOD), our wireless access throughout every district building, our use of blended on-line classes, our move to Google Docs, and creating a non-profit company to provide inexpensive technology to our students. Perhaps we’re too small to count, or maybe we’re just a well-kept secret, but Gateway continues to quietly lead the way in supporting the innovative use of technology in education.
So why move to electronic readers? There are a number of reasons including a potential cost savings over time, the relevance and ability to stay current with information providing to students, the ease of using these readers, the additional supplemental activities that students and staff can participate in while using e-textbooks, the opportunity to adapt textbooks to a particular class and subject, the health benefits of eliminating 50 pounds of textbooks in a student’s backpack, and the opportunities it gives students to use the technology that’s currently being used in many careers and will be crucial to have mastery of as they move forward in life. For an overview of the possibilities, despite being only one company, explore http://www.apple.com/education/ibooks-textbooks/.
How are we implementing the program? We asked teacher volunteers to model and pilot e-textbooks in select classes in the high school. Classes/subjects were chosen for two reasons. First, we needed to consider replacing textbooks in the near future for these courses. Second, they were likely to have some shared students, thereby allowing for e-textbooks in different classes but with the same core of students so that the overall initial costs would remain reasonable. We allowed for different ways for teachers to implement the e-textbooks including accessing already developed e-books, creating their own, or using a series of different web sites as resources. No one provider was required to be used and, over time, we’ll also take a look at a variety of e-readers to ensure that we get the most functionality for students at the best price.
What does the future hold? As so many individuals move to non-print sources of information, as the amount of knowledge continues to grow exponentially, and as the additional skills of collaboration, communication, self-learning, being able to think critically, innovation, and applying knowledge to solve problems become as important as scoring well on a standardized test, it’s important that we give students the tools and experiences necessary to thrive on the information superhighway. Our pilot programs will help us assess what works well, what modifications need to be made, what platforms work best, and how we can best use these tools in the classroom. I hope that we’ll be able to expand the model programs to other grade levels to test-drive changes and that we’ll eventually be able to provide these tools throughout the district. Ideally we’ll be successful and able to both save money while increasing opportunities for our students. If we remain mindful that our real objective is to prepare our children to be productive, successful, and engaged members of society, then this would appear to be the next logical step in adapting education to the future.
