An Interesting Experiment (Maybe): A High School without Textbooks

Now, lest Mac fans, based on this post, think that I’m not up on the good news in MacLand:

Ariz. high school trades books for laptops

VAIL, Ariz. — Students at Empire High School here started class this year with no textbooks — but it wasn’t because of a funding crisis. Instead, the school issued iBooks — laptop computers by Apple Computer Inc. — to each of its 340 students, becoming one of the first U.S. public schools to shun printed textbooks.

School officials believe the electronic materials will get students more engaged in learning. Empire High, which opened for the first time this year, was designed specifically to have a textbook-free environment.

“We’ve always been pretty aggressive in use of technology and we have a history of taking risks,” said Calvin Baker, superintendent of the Vail Unified School District, which has 7,000 students outside of Tucson.

Schools typically overlay computers onto their instruction “like frosting on the cake,” Baker said. “We decided that the real opportunity was to make the laptops the key ingredient of the cake. … to truly change the way that schools operated.”

Backpack makers are not pleased, unless they also happen to make laptop cases.

The idea sounds cool, but I’ll withdraw my support if I find out that the kids aren’t reading Dickens, Shakespeare, or the Greek classics on their computers.