Georgia May Ditch Textbooks for iPads
RSSBy Lauren Barack
Georgia is considering tossing its textbooks for iPads. In a move led by its senate president Tommie Williams, the state is looking to see if it can substitute print books with iPads, according to a recent story in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. (Williams did not return repeated calls to his district and state offices.) With an annual outlay of $40 million for textbooks, the state is investigating if it can—and should—divert those funds to purchase the Apple tablet computers, says Williams. As K-12 schools around the country begin to adopt ereaders in classrooms and media centers, few schools have attempted to implement the devices school wide, nor has a whole state, as Georgia appears to be doing, elected to replace printed matter for digital text entirely. Even media specialists, often some of the first in schools to adopt digital tools, say an all or nothing approach such as the one Georgia is considering may be an extreme one. "I don't object to the use of iPads but I would hope that the district doesn't do away with everything else," says Cassandra Barnett, school librarian at Fayetteville (AR) High School Library and past president of the American Association of School Librarians, by email. "The philosophy of a library is to provide a wide variety of materials and formats to meet everyone's needs. The iPads alone may not do that." Of concern, too, say educators, is the content that's currently available on iPads. While the device's iBook application provides access to a wide range of digital books, educators would like to see districts look beyond simply replacing textbooks, as Williams has stated, and consider the kind of specialized material, apps and otherwise, that maximize the iPad's capability. Moreover, many hope that legislators open to adopting these tools will consider expanding beyond digital versions of a standard textbook and truly embrace 21st-century education to its fullest. "I would love to see more of these open sources, authoritative approaches to online textbooks, but one of my worries is that textbooks made for iPads would (at least initially) be text versions mashed up with their website videos and dumped into a digital file," says Melissa Techman, librarian and tech lead teacher at Broadus Wood Elementary School, based in Earlysville, VA. "Moving content from one medium to another without any or much change seems contrary to the whole spirit of the hybrid and interactive learning possibilities we want." This article originally appeared in the newsletter Extra Helping. Go here to subscribe. You might also like: Fully Loaded: Outfitting a teacher librarian for the 21st century. Here's what it takes. How To Get Library Ebooks on the iPad/iPhone, No Sync Required Ereaders, the iPad—Is That All There Is?
Photo by David Ortez
