Our local schools no longer use textbooks, they all have laptops. These laptops aren't just loaded with the textbooks or something. They have INTERNET access....these students are on twitter, facebook, pinterest, online shopping, etc. ALL day long! Do you honestly think they learn anything!?! It's just plain ignorant of the school. Then the students get upset when one of their websites gets blocked. They have set up a twitter page to complain about how much they hate their school....oy! I'm so happy to be a homeschool mom!
Yep.. Same thing here.... My son was at the local high school this year for about 6 weeks. They were in the process of transitioning over to laptops. In the meantime they had textbooks that stayed in the classrooms with the teachers. If there was homework or you needed to study you had to check one out by a certain time and most of the time the books were gone by the time my son got in there to get one. I'm with you on the idea of giving teens a computer to use that has access to the whole internet.. It's nuts.. You KNOW they are just playing on it!! Wow..
Here's my experience from the PS teaching side. Our district went to laptops in phases. High schools (4 in total) first plus one intermediate school that was a brand new building and was touted as a high-technology school. The next year, the other 6 intermediate schools were supposed to receive laptops. We didn't get them. Why? The intermediate kids (and the high schoolers to a pretty high degree) with the laptops destroyed them. They were constantly in the tech department for repairs. They were pawned at pawn shops. They were forgotten at home. They brought them with dead batteries. They were left in vehicles so that they were ruined by heat or just stolen. They were left outside in the rain during football practice. I will say -- Our filters blocked the majority of sites that would be inappropriate in any way plus any social network sites. But... They would load inappropriate photos from home so that they could access them at school. They figured out ways to get around the blocks by accessing the websites at home and leaving them open in a browser so that they could then use them in the school building. Cheating rose. It's so much easier to share your digital work with your peers and easily change small things to make it appear your own. Of course, some of them weren't even smart enough to do that, so you'd get assignments turned in that looked exactly 100% the same... with different names. It's actually a lot more obvious than you'd think and obviously moreso apparent than the kids thought. Some teachers weren't born yesterday! ha And then the textbooks and "paperless" society that was forced on them. Surprisingly, a lot of students hated the online/digital texts. They couldn't utilize them the way they did a real book and they found it difficult to use well. The kids hated not having a hard copy of their notes or worksheets. They wanted the real thing to mark up and write on and highlight to help them study. This was particularly true for the high school kids training in the EMS and CNA programs that were on campus. As far as I know -- the high schools still have laptops, as does that original intermediate campus. Teachers across the district may have them now as well, but I can't really remember. However, they've halted the full roll-out of laptops across the student body. Of course they won't admit to any of the above that I've outlined, but that's the true reasons. The cost of all of that did not outweigh the benefits.
I thought about this the other day. I was sitting in a waiting room in a "strip mall" plaza and a young boy was playing a game on an IPad. The mom wanted to walk down the sidewalk so she pulled the iPad away from the boy and turned it off because she "didn't want it to get dropped and broken". I started thinking about all the times my son would be reading a book and we could go somewhere with it in his hands and just open it back up and keep reading.
I feel the same way. The loss of old school textbooks is just really sad to me. There is nothing so comforting as the feel of a well worn binding in my hands. I'm afraid all this technology is going to backfire and kids will never know the thrill of re-reading an old friend. So much for ps pushing literacy. And really, did the school not anticipate the lack of responsibility this "gimme" generation would show?
