The budget crunch has caused some rough times for cities and municipalities in the U.S. (I don't know what it is like in Canada because Toronto, my own municipality, hasn't been able to balance its budget for years now) and this has caused some of them to teach students on the cheap. Arnold Schwarzenegger has canceled the contract with textbook companies and switched to lower cost electronic versions of textbooks. Surprisingly I haven't seen teachers and school districts in the state of California screaming. Instead the news seems to imply that schools elsewhere may use California as a model and use the same technique to lower their school budgets. We may be seeing electronic textbooks in our classrooms in a few short years if this experiment is successful.
Advantages that I can see:
(1) lower cost
(2) able to update textbooks quickly and inexpensively
(3) convenience and smaller size
Disadvantages
(1) lower income students may have less access (its not clear how they plan to get around that one)
(2) electronic formats are WAY less convenient than their printed counterparts (what about notes in the margin?)
(3) inconvenience and larger size (a laptop or desktop is significantly larger than a textbook, but an iphone or a kindle are both smaller...which is it going to be?)
(4) there is a learning curve involved in using this technology
The NY Times also highlighted a school district in Connecticut. Connecticut District Tosses Algebra Textbooks and Goes Online. They switched from textbooks to e-books for a reason other than budgetary.
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Advantage
ReplyDelete(4) Eliminates need to track down missing textbooks again at the end of the year (or try to squeeze $70-100 out of students who have 'lost' them)
Disadvantage
(5) Allowing, or even requiring, students to use cell phones or other electronic devices in class will result in even less work getting done! We currently ban cell phones in class; otherwise students text rather than paying attention or doing any work. In my recent university experience, both undergrad and grad, students with laptops in lecture are rarely (and I mean really, really, rarely) on course websites. What a disaster that would be in high school, where student motivation is often even lower.
Note: My school currently doesn't use textbooks in most math courses below the academic level. We simply kill a lot of trees (and time) photocopying handouts. An e-text as an extra resource would be nice ... as long as kids don't have to use them during class.
Let me cancel out your advantage (4). Some of the articles hint that they are lending out e-book readers since the cost of a reader is roughly the same as a single textbook.
ReplyDeleteSmart phones are changing the world...invest in them now.
For my cryptography course I allowed calculators when we did number theory. To make sure that students know the tricks of calculating a^b (mod m), examples need to be long enough (>2-3 digits) that they require someone with a calculator to use the tricks/theorems but not too long that a^2 causes an overflow error. This year technology started to get the best of me...iPhones are capable of doing larger calculations so I had to outlaw them on the final because could make a problem that someone using a traditional calculator needs to know the theorem and someone with a mini-computer doesn't. I could have designed an 'iPhone' question which was slightly larger (>4-5 digits) and could stump the smart phone but that leaves the $2 calculators out in the cold. It will be fun to teach the class with the assumption that everyone has access to a laptop.
I still feel I need to explicitly state that 'phone a friend' is not an option during the quizzes and tests for cryptography but the cheating is nowhere near as bad as it was when Saajida took the course.
Glad to hear it ... when Saajida took the course it was pretty rampant.
ReplyDeleteI'm not sure I'd like my students to have access to laptops and cell phones in class either. It's hard enough getting kids to concentrate as it is, having to make sure they're all on task with the technology would be a nightmare. (The one time I pulled out the CAS calculators with my nine applieds, within 5 minutes most of them found games on it, which I didn't even know were there).
Note to Alice: you're not the only one killing trees. We don't use texts for the applied level either. I can't remember which board you're in, but our board provides us with TIPSRM workbooks free every semester, which cuts down a lot of photocopying. I'm sure your board must have somthing similar.
As if on cue, a story appears on Google News that is related about Scribd, a book repository.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.scribd.com/