Digital textbooks scroll schools into new era

Amy Hetzner:

It was awhile before Pewaukee High School English teacher Christina LeDonne knew that one of her students had misplaced his paperback copy of "Lord of the Flies" for a school assignment.

Armed with one of the laptops that the Pewaukee School District has given to every student in seventh through 10th grade this school year, the student tracked down an online version of the classic novel and read along with the rest of the class without skipping a beat.

Such incidents have only encouraged the view among school leaders and teachers - amazed by the continued growth of available, and even free, resources on the Web - that traditional print materials have a limited life expectancy in schools.

"I don't think it's just inevitable, I think it's here," Phil Ertl, superintendent of the Wauwatosa School District, said of the prospect of digital textbooks.

The proliferation of mobile technology, which is leading some schools to experiment with one-to-one computing initiatives, combined with the expansion of traditional textbook publishers onto the Internet means that many students are reading in a whole new way.

Posted by Jim Zellmer at January 17, 2011 1:02 AM
Subscribe to this site via RSS/Atom: Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas