Bye Bye Text Books!

ipad Text Book

          Do today's students really need text books?  What are the benefits of having text books in our classrooms?  Some of the beneficial points of having a text book is that the students will have to read an actual book. You know what a book is right?  Those weird old things made of paper that have a lot of words in it. People of olden times liked to keep those "books" in a thing called a library.  Go ahead and Google what a library is if you must.

Something call an encyclopedia...

          Back to the benefits of having books in our classrooms.  Students will need to know the concepts of text. The text concepts are simple yet they are disappearing from our schools.  Do students know how to use or even find a glossary, index or table of content? Do students know where and or how to find the answers to their problems without doing an internet search?  Everyday we are losing students to the laziness of the interwebs. Just imagine doing a research project without the use of the internet. It is a scary thought, I know, but it was done and should still be done to some extent. It is hard to believe, but before we had Wikipedia we had these books called encyclopedias.
          Even though I think reading actual, real life, page turning texts is an important part of literacy as a whole, there are many drawbacks to having these expository text books in our schools.  In most school districts today one of the top priorities is the budget. Everything always seems to revolve around the monetary predicament.  How much money do we have?  What do we need?  How will we get it what we need?  Here is a secret for you.  Schools do not have that much money to spend on books, let alone pay their employees that great of a salary. Shocking, I know, right?
         On average, most text books cost $50-$100 a piece. That adds up to a lot of money if your high school has 2,000 students and all of the students need 5 text books per academic term (quarter, semester, year). Lets do the mean of the average, so $75 per book.  5 books per students. That adds up to $375 per student for books.  2,000 students need $375 worth of books. So it turns out your high school needs $750,000 in text books annually.  Most schools do not purchase new books every year for the sole reason of money. If schools do not purchase new books then that must mean that the students are reading and learning about materials that are in most cases out of date or inaccurate. There must be another way!

Note cards from highlighted text

          Apple, and their team of thinkers have partnered up with many of the big text book publishers to create an alternative to the big, heavy, and expensive text book. Apple has made the text books available for a much cheaper price. For around $15, a new text can be purchased on their latest version of the ipad. In these texts you can highlight, make study cards, instantly access dictionary and glossaries and interact with multiple styles of visuals. 
          I feel that it is inevitable that this new technology will be implemented in a majority of our schools very soon.  We as a nation are in a technology boom.  The technology is becoming cheaper by the hour and our school budgets are decreasing just as quickly.  Having the option of all of the students' texts on a single ipad will save money, create an interest in learning and even save our students health i.e. back problems.