This week an article I read called "Left to Their Own Devices" got me thinking about the pros and cons of school district issued laptops for students. The article brought up many good points and left me more undecided as ever on whether the ideal of an all digital curriculum is practical. I had heard of many schools in our area that had been experimenting with the idea with middle and high school students. During the same conversation, I also heard that the tests were a nightmare and I didn't even want to now what some students had done to their school issued, taxpayer paid laptop computers. The article brought up even more cons to the idea outside of the usual physical destruction that occurs. The fact that not all students are on the same tech savvy level and that if students brought their own computers from home, the teacher would have to play to the lowest system was a good point. The prevalence of hackers and overall cost, time and energy required to go all digital just doesn't seem all that practical at this time.
With that said, I do think having a digital option for textbooks is something to consider, certainly at the college level at the very least. It seems almost archaic that college students still have to pay huge sums of money for physical books that are going to be out of date and useless in a year and not worth selling to anybody. Electronic textbooks that you can download to a mobile device, read whenever is convenient for you and fit in the palm of your hand would be wonderful. I can only hope that colleges see the need to go digital and move closer in this direction soon.
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