Last week, Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan and Federal Communications Chairman, Julius Genachowski challenged companies and school districts to get digital textbooks in the hands of students within five years[i]. The Challenge stems from Apple’s announcement that it will begin selling digital versions of high school textbooks for the Ipad. Secretary Duncan believes that digital textbooks can provide the interactive learning students are asking for and provides cost effectiveness that schools need as they manage smaller budgets.
To aid school districts with developing a transfer plan, the Department of Education released a “playbook” that provides guidance to school districts on how to change from print textbooks to digital textbooks. Currently Florida, Idaho, Utah, and California and some smaller districts have converted to digital textbooks with mixed results.
The change to digital textbooks is a necessity that can no longer be ignored. However, the initial costs to convert will be expensive. First, school districts will have to expand and upgrade the limited broadband capabilities of their buildings. Since many school buildings are at least 70-80 years old, the wiring that has been done in many buildings was to support a limited number of computers in the schools. The wiring, routers, and serves needed to support the number of electronic devices (desktop computers, laptops, tablets, etc) per teacher, student, and administrative staff will be expensive to upgrade and maintain. Additionally, the costs to repair or replace broken, defects, or lost devices and the software upgrades, and licenses are costs that will be an ongoing expense to school budgets. Finally, the costs to train teachers to become more tech savvy and modify their pedagogy by using digital textbooks, may be a difficult challenge.
Asking teachers to trust and follow a new pedagogy that places technology as the main conduit to teaching and learning will require teachers to embrace major ideological shift in the nature of their job. As leaders of instruction, teachers will have to defer some of their authority as content specialist and consider the ideas of students of students who will have content outside of the prescribed curriculum from the web.
If teachers buy into a new way of teaching and learning, our educational system will get back on track to competing on a global level. Students will benefit from digital learning because their learning will be interactive and geared towards their learning strengths which should translate into engaged learning.
The final challenge is for businesses to make the costs of transition to digital books affordable for school districts. Businesses will have to be willing to be a true partner with districts by providing a product that will be both engaging for teachers and students and costs effective. Here is hoping we can meet the Digital Challenge in five years!
No comments:
Post a Comment