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Sony Readers are replacing paper textbooks at a Toronto high school: Why I’m thrilled as a teacher
November 19, 2009 | 9:07 am
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By Joanna
School-supplied video.
A prep school in Massachusetts created an uproar by saying e-books would replace paper books in its library.
Now a private high school in Toronto says it is tossing out p-textbooks in favor of Sony e-book readers. The school has deployed at least 110 readers already and is ordering hundreds more.
“Our student survey shows that they are twice as likely to read a book available in an e-book format as in hard copy form," says Sam Blyth, chair at Blyth Academy.
Catnip for students raised on tech
There has been a growing emphasis among schools to engage student interest through technology, and this initiative appears to be, in part, a response to that. A comment from Sam Blyth is of special interest:
"When they were told they would be able to download books free, we asked them ‘Would you be more likely to read outside of school?’ they came back with a yes, and that clinched it."
As a teacher, I have long agreed with the growing chorus of e-book fans who say that the problem is not print versus e-book versus whatever, but that fewer people read for pleasure. Might not e-book readers help popularize recreational reading among the growing number of young people raised on technology?
Textbook access is just one benefit. Schools are using the readers to download other documents such as schedules to keep with them at all times
A back-saver
Meanwhile children are spared the burden of carrying traditionally bulky textbooks to and from school with them. In my work, I have seen students struggle with rolling backpacks full of binders, lunch items, school supplies and books on top of that. A slim little e-book reader would certainly remove a dozen pounds or more from the typical student load.
Granted, e-book readers might not be a perfect solution. Pearson Educational Media is providing content, and I wrote in the summer about my not very positive university-level experience with Pearson. I hope the company is offering more junior users a better vetted and more useful experience. And a future user community seems to not be available yet.
Netbooks a possibility, too—for both reading and writing
School board members in the public school system appear to be waiting for integrated virtual assessment tools and other trimmings. But some already are tech-boosters. One trustee quoted by parentcentral.ca visited a school in Littleton, Colorado, using netbooks with great success. “It was amazing to watch how involved every single kid was in what they were doing.” See a related blog item from the Littleton on the success students have achieved in writing with netbooks—which might also be used in reading.
While we don’t yet have the tools for a perfect system, Blyth is still to be praised for trying to innovate—and for taking advantage of the opportunity to try and hook students into pleasure reading while they are at it, too. There is great potential in the e-market, both for pleasure reading and for environments such as a school. I just wish publishers would realize that there are so many great things which can happen, and that the best way for them to survive and thrive in the digital age is to embrace it, rather than fight to keep the status quo forever.
Editor’s note For a different perspective, read about disabled student Robert Kingett’s reservations about the Kindle and also E-textbooks not ready for college students yet? Likewise of interest would be the New York Times series on the future of reading, including the issue of whether the Internet has helped or hurt—in addition to various viewpoints on e-books and the brain. For research findings and other observations on e-books in K-12, check out our past items on the work of Dr. Richard Bellever at Ball State University. In addition, see—from the Huffington Post—the latest version of my proposal for a well-stocked national digital library system for K-12 users and others. – D.R.
Update, 12:55 p.m.: New links: E-books go to college, but books still rule the campus, not Kindle in AOL Daily Finance and Sony Reader follows Kindle to the Great White North in Engadget. Also see Google news roundup.
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Comments:
Hm… there’s one thing I don’t understand: are they giving away the e-textbooks for free?
I mean: is this a choice between e-books and p-books, or is this a choice between paying $700/year on textbooks (that’s how much the student would pay according to this online article: http://bit.ly/6BpSF) or getting them for free?
I can’t find a clear word on this matter, but I feel it’s a necessary piece of information to evaluate the program, its results and how likely it is the model could be exported elsewhere.
Thanks! Enrico
Hi, Enrico. My guess is that textbook costs are built into the tuition, just like the expense of the Sony Readers themselves. But let me see if I can’t email the school for answer. Your question is highly appropriate.
Thanks,
David
How does one teach chemistry, biology or physics without color diagrams?
A point well taken, David. I suspect there are ways around the problem, but color is better—and one reason why I personally favor LCDs over E Ink, if there’s only one choice. It isn’t just a matter of illustrations. Many young people favor color.
I have pointed Sam Blyth at the school to this post and questions, and I hope he’ll be responsive to your query.
That said, it’s good to see the school experiment, but if there are problems because of the lack of color, I hope the school will favor education over tech and “cheat” a little with p-books.
Thanks,
David R
Color diagrams, for a school that selects its textbooks and has lesson plans, so that it knows that sophomore history will cover chapters 12-18 this quarter, can be color printouts of just pictures. So students carry an e-reader for text, and a magazine-sized binder with photo extras for all the students’ classes that month. Beats carrying around multiple hardcover texts with the whole year’s materials, when only a few chapters are in use at any time.
Most eBooks readable on the Sony reader also runs in free apps on the desktop/laptop in multiple apps (e.g. EBL, DE) – in full color, on big screens. And usually with some printing permissions. Devices are handy for on-the-go and slouching around the house. But for a textbook, if I’m near a running computer, (maybe writing a paper and facebooking at the same time?) guess which screen that book would be on.
And then there’s the fact that my third graders (yea twins) have computers in their class rooms at Seattle Public Schools.
We should always remember that eReading devices are only one of the (quickly growing) number of places that students, workers, house-dads, etc have eBooks at their fingertips. – Coming to a TV near you!
“How does one teach chemistry, biology or physics without color diagrams?”
OK, let us get a bit basic on this — text books are just that books of text. Any text book that requires more than a few well drafted line drawings is a failure.
We have many failures posing as text books.
I am not being trite or mindlessly old fashioned, but as an ex-teacher the lack of well written text books means students lack the major conceptual tool needed to understand their subject.
Alan Kaufman
San Francisco poet and author
Posted: December 4, 2009 02:20 PM
Huffington Post
When I hear the term Kindle I think not of imaginations fired but of crematoria lit. And when I hear the term “hi-tech” I think not of helpful androids efficiently performing household chores or light-speed rockets gliding seamlessly through space but of the fact that between 1933-45, modern technology was used to perform in ever more efficient ways the mass murder of six million of my people. The instruments of so-called progress, placed in the hands of the modern state, disappeared six million Jewish men, women and children, into a void from which they will never return and in which a majority of them remain forever unidentified. This was done in the name of progress by means of technology for the creation of a better world.
The Nazis often were, by their own lights, well-intentioned idealists working for a better tomorrow. And their instrument was modern technology, aspects of philosophical and aesthetic modernism and the old religious concept of supercession implicit in the Christian notion of progress. Jews were outmoded, useless, they said. Most high level Nazis, like Himmler or Heydrich or Eichmann, did not feel visceral hatred towards the Jew. Rather, they looked upon them coldly as something that simply needed to disappear so that the new life could get on its way. And the means by which they sought to do so was first through a propaganda campaign that portrayed Jews, in Wagnerian terms, as a drag on the visionary energies and bursting vigor of the new Aryan man, and then by the implementation of this decision to eliminate Jews through ever more sophisticated state corporate and scientific technological means. And yet, during the war crime trials at Nuremberg, while Nazi Jurisprudence was tried and hanged, Nazi technological attitudes were not put on trial.
The victorious Allies did not mandate that technology, which had been turned to such murderous ends, must pass an ethical standard review from an international body, like a UN of technology. No such body of decision came about. To the contrary, even while the war crime trials of Nazi chieftains were in session, American and Soviet governments were recruiting high-level Nazis to their intelligence services, military armaments industries, and space programs. So that, while in jurisprudence terms Nazi social and political values were delivered a blow, the Nazi fascination with technology merged seamlessly with that of their conquerors: us.
That is why today we drive Volkswagens, which were invented by Hitler, and use space heaters from companies that may once have manufactured crematoria and why Werner Von Braun, the Nazi father of the V-2 rocket became an American space pioneer hero studied in public schools. Nazi Technology and corporate methodology was folded handily into American feel-good Capitalist culture. That is the very point of the brilliant satire, “Dr. Strangelove”.
So that now, sixty four years after the Holocaust, the Nazi disdain for the book has become the feel-good Hi-Tech campaign to rid the world of books in place of massive easily controlled centralized repositories of book texts downloadable on little hand-held devices and from which a text can be dissapeared with the click of a mouse: in Nazi terms, a dream come true.
How grave was Nazi contempt for books? As response to the book burnings in Germany, in the May 11, 1933 issue of Chicago’s Daily Worker, (and years before the first fully operational death camps opened their furnace doors), a grim cartoon entitled “Altars of the Nazis” portrayed two smoking crematoria of equal size, placed side by side, one marked “Nazi Victims” and the other “Condemned Books”. The link between contempt for books and mass murder could not be more clear.
President Roosevelt, recognizing the threat of Nazi attitudes to the book, launched a full-scale government campaign, and declaring it part of the national war effort, said: “…books…embody man’s eternal fight against tyranny. In this war, we know, books are weapons.”
In World War II, people died to produce and protect books. Anti-Fascist organizations, American Jewish Groups and writers, editors and journalists launched massive demonstrations in defense of the book, including, on March 10, 1933, the largest march, to that date, in the history of New York City: 100,000 people turned out to express outrage at the burning of books and other events in Germany. In its coverage of the Berlin book burnings, Newsweek used “Holocaust” as its headline.
Today’s hi-tech propagandists tell us that the book is a tree-murdering, space-devouring, inferior form that society would be better off without. In its place, they want us to carry around the Uber-Kindle.
The hi-tech campaign to relocate books to Google and replace books with Kindles is, in its essence, a deportation of the literary culture to a kind of easily monitored concentration camp of ideas, where every examination of a text leaves behind a trail, a record, so that curiosity is also tinged with a sense of disquieting fear that some day someone in authority will know that one had read a particular book or essay. This death of intellectual privacy was also a dream of the Nazis. And when I hear the term Kindle, I think not of imaginations fired but of crematoria lit.
@Alan: You’ve taken your essay and turned it into spam. A simple link to your HuffPo piece would have done the job. More importantly, you didn’t respond to Ficbot’s article directly (e.g., “e-books will turn young people into Brownshirts”), but preferred to broadcast to us. Before you criticize technology, it’ll be a great idea to understand it better.
@Everyone else: Back to the usual conversation in this thread. We have other places where people can comment on Alan K.
David Rothman
Editor-Publisher
TeleRead.org