I don't know why, but I'm going to keep trying.
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Sounds like Fribur is only interested in the worst case scenario(s).
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"trust me, kids will drop it in water dur dur"? So silly.
Worst case? Worst case would be far worse than anything I've said so far. I'm talking about reality, as someone who sits in a classroom and deals with expensive items being given to to students every single year. I know the reality of how often things break, and how often things have to be fixed and paid for when students break them.
Every year in my classroom 50 - 60 students begin instruments in 6th grade. Musical instruments are generally easy to take care of, for adults. We don't break them, because we treat them as the expensive items they are. Students, on the other hand, are stupid about these kinds of things. 60 instruments go out, 20 are repaired by the end of the first year. These are damn expensive items, with expensive repair bills. You guys keep acting like students will take a Kindle and treat it well... like a kindle. They are not heavy duty items. They will break, and they cost more to replace than books. In addition, books break much less easily. Make fun of me all you like, but that's simply because you have no experience actually working with kids with expensive items, and you don't know what the fuck you are talking about.
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I don't know why people would need internet at home to use the digital books, so why is this such a big point people are trying to make? The books wouldn't need to be updated every day/week/month/or even year, necessarily. Textbooks don't go through this many changes, after all. And if they did need to be updated, why wouldn't that happen at school?
I said you would have to have internet at home, OR at school. See the "or?" If you are going to tout an advantage of digital books as "easily updatable," then when someone talks about the one easy way to update shit available you can't pretend you don't understand why it's being brought up. Ideally an automatic update system done wirelessly over the internet would be awesome for frequent updates. Unfortunately many schools and homes don't have such items yet, and one or the other would have to get it-- at once again additional cost. How, again, will this save money?
Hooking every reader to a computer to do a manual update is not easier at all, when you are talking about thousands of them, and each grade needing different ones. Receiving a new textbook in the mail is far easier.
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And this plan wouldn't be simply removing all books from all schools. It would be a gradual process. But it DOES have to happen at some point. I don't see how anyone can argue against that transition. So if you agree that moving away from textbooks and moving towards the digital age does need to happen, then why not embrace it and think of the potential for greatness it has, rather than "trust me, kids will drop it in water dur dur"? So silly.
I don't embrace it because California is in massive red ink, and this will INCREASE costs, not decrease them. It's a big money proposition, and it isn't going to save them anything. I believe this is now the 5th time I've said something like this.
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Even assuming all that is true, and that the school has 1. no wireless internet and 2. that the school needs to individually hook up each e-reader to update it, that's STILL easier than printing new text books entirely from scratch.
How so, from the school's point of view? I can order a set of books and have it arrive with a simple phone call, for less money than I can buy the Ereaders, THEN buy the textbooks (for the same price), then pay someone to sit for a few days and update them all.
Cheaper and easier to buy the books.
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If we move to electronic textbooks, then we can change the way we make deals with text providers. Have the text providers update it every year or every semester as part of their contract. This doesn't really mean much for most science or math texts, but history, economics, social studies, etc. can all benefit from being up-to-date. One of the things I remember about those books in high school were that they were often out-of-date with their info, especially about major world events.
I would LOVE this, and I hope someday we have something like this. I can't imagine such added functionality would be cheaper than a book though-- it would be more, as it offers a much bigger advantage.
It's a side topic, but science books would greatly benefit from this too-- science also changes quite rapidly, and science books are often out of date within a year or two.
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Think about the impact of 9-11, or of the fall of the Berlin Wall, or any number of events that occurred that changed the world. How many years were kids taught from texts that didn't cover those events because they were too recent? These are events that actually have an immediate impact on their lives, but they aren't covered. With a new electronic system in place, those updates can be in a timely manner.
I'm sorry, but I laughed out loud in my living room when I read this one. Do you honestly believe that these events weren't covered in class when they happened? Do you think that over the last year the election between Obama and Bush wasn't talked about in classes all over the country, despite the fact that it wasn't in their textbooks? Do you really believe teachers don't watch the news of any kind, and only teach what their textbook tells them too? Only if the teacher is terrible, and that teacher deserves to be fired. This is not an argument for or against a digital text at all.
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Now, I don't know what school you teach at, but the ones I attended the teachers didn't coordinate who was giving textbook homework on what nights. I walked to and from school, and if I had 3 or 4 of my teachers all give homework on the same night, that was a ton of weight I was carrying home. I realize the stack of texts above isn't indicative of a typical student's workload, it was just to show that books are HEAVY, and that even a couple of them can fuck up a kid's back.
I don't know what to say about this one. Since you are talking about multiple teachers, I have to assume you are talking about high school. What can I say to that? Maybe you need to toughen up a little? They are in high school-- were you a pussy in high school?
In elementary school they generally have one teacher for all their classes, and much less homework anyway, so it's not a problem there. In the middle school where I work they work together to plan out homework so things aren't due at the same time and kids can space it out *if they plan ahead.* If they procrastinate? Well then a heavy backpack is part of the consequence I suppose. Welcome to real life!
Oooh I just realized that I have 12 year old 6th graders carry a Tenor Sax or a Baritone home most days-- that's 35ish pounds in addition to their backpacks. Maybe we should stop using instruments and switch to kazoos. No wait, the kids don't complain at all and can handle it. Hrmmmmm....
I'm sorry for being an ass in the last few paragraphs, but damn lol... we're not talking about heavy labor here to take a few books home.