A number of years ago I was teaching a gifted and talented pull out program in an elementary school in southern New Jersey. One of the gifts to the program was our first computer, an Apple IIE. The students were mesmerized by the computer and could not keep their hands off of it. They begged me to find software and activities so they could use this new devise. During parents’ open house that year, the parents of the children in the program told me that their children could not stop raving about the computer and they wanted to buy one for Christmas. This was my first experience with technological innovations in the classroom.
Fast forward to 2013, over 30 years since my experience and we are now reading about schools doing away with books and paper, making them obsolete altogether. Students come to class with iPads and can almost instantaneously locate information that would have taken much longer to find by looking topics up in books or trekking to the library. Teachers too are issued iPads already loaded with applications that are suited for classroom use.
Now this particular school I had read about was a private parochial school in Florida but the implications for education are dramatic. One obvious critical issue facing any effort to do this in the public school venue will be, of course, the cost. The school in Florida overhauled it entire wireless network and increased bandwidth with new fiber optic cable. This is an expensive proposition. Committees were formed to determine the most suitable device for student use, examining Kindles, Nooks, Android tablets and even laptops.
Electronic education is coming to a school near you (if it hasn’t come already) and it is crucial that teachers stay on top of current technology so that they can be there for students. Is this the end of textbooks as we know them? Who knows? But what we are seeing and will continue to see is a major paradigm shift in what was once traditional education.
C.2013 J. Margolis
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