The following is an email from a student in LPS to her principal:
My name is Ericka and I am a freshman. I enjoy all of the great activities that our school has to offer. I am taking all honors classes. In these classes there are many textbooks, which are very heavy. On some nights I have to bring home almost four books which is hard when I ride a bus from school to my home. I would like to suggest that we put all of the textbooks online and with all of the money that the school would save they could purchase a school set of laptops in order to be able to use all of the Wireless Internet around the school and make everything more accessible for students.
Having a laptop with all of the required textbooks would create better grades for the students. To begin, not long ago I was packing up my backpack getting ready to head home and the person that has locker near mine mentioned to a friend "I am not going to do my math homework because I don't want to bring home my textbook." Of course the friend agreed. This is just a small homework assignment which only counts for about five points, but those five points start to add up. Also, during exams students will need to study. It is painful to have to carry home five or six textbooks every night. A laptop would be so much more convenient.
Next, having all of the textbooks online would reduce the risk of students losing their books and not to mention all of the wear and tear the books would not have. Also, it would make the bookkeeper’s job less stressful not to mention how much more room for storage there would be without all of the textbooks. Plus all of the sorting and numbering would take forever by hand using laptops the students could just return the books through a program to calculate the books and fines.
I do realize that it would take quite a bit of funding but I can imagine the companies that would donate to a school like ours. This is the future of the world where everything will be on computers and there will not be that many textbooks to read out of. Thank you for your time and I hope you will consider this action as a positive one for our school!
Thank You,
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Ericka
Ericka has a good point. And there are other issue with textbooks other than their bulk. Accuracy, availability, interactivity are all problems that paper-based information has. And ever tried a key-word search in a textbook. I've actually found myself feeling a little frustrated when combing through a book that I can't just do a quick search... silly as that sounds, it's true for me.
But I think we all know the considerable limitations on textbooks. It's the solution that is the problem. If we went to web-based content, would then need to provide every student a computer and home Internet access? Those of us who take having a computer connected to a broadband Internet connection for granted don't see this as an issue... but not quite everyone is connected yet.
So what do you think?