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the paperless high school 
07.21.2005, 7:37 AM
posted by kim white
According to a recent article in the Arizona Daily Star, Empire High School in Vail, Arizona will soon become the state's first all-wireless, all-laptop public school. The laptops will entirely replace paper textbooks. Traditional lesson plans will be built around online articles and electronic reference material. Adminstrators are betting that this flexible teacher-driven curriculum will inspire both students and teachers.
Calvin Baker, superintendent of Vail Unified School District, said the move to electronic materials gets teachers away from the habit of simply marching through a textbook each year.
Educators also believe the initiative will improve learning, engage tech-saavy students, and better prepare them for future careers.
Posted by kim white on July 21, 2005 7:37 AM
tags: Education
comments (2):
gary frost on August 4, 2005 10:18 PM:Thomas Mann describes attributes of the classified print collections compared with on-line resources in the latest issue of American Libraries, August 2005. He describes the finding efficencies of browsing contrasted with finding inefficencies of on-line searching. But this still doesn't go to the heart of the print attribute.
In humanist studies print excells on-line access to the same content because of superior legibility, navigation and persistence. The speed of legibility, not the resolution, is superior enabling a reader to glance at a book as contrasted with scrolling a screen and the processing thousands of arbitrary keyword results. The navigation is superior due to haptic attributes and lack of software mediation. And then the classified books stay on the shelf persistently providing consistent reader presentations across time and cultures.
Keyword searching is adapted machine access while book consultation is adapted to bionic access.
kim white on August 9, 2005 2:13 PM:It will be interesting to see how this experiment goes. Using online articles as course material will be good insofaras readings will be up-to-date, but it will certainly be problematic if the site hosting the article decides to take it down when the class is halfway through the assignment. Also, "the dog ate my paper" excuse will be superceded by myriad pleas of technical difficulties (or legibility issues as you are calling them). Add to that the certainty that many of these materials will not be available from year to year, forcing teachers to do the time-consuming work of gathering course material over and over again.
