Textbooks are bad, laptops are good.

“In the next three to five years, everything we know will be turned upside,” he said. “Just as the printing press created a new social class – the mercantile class instead of just kings and peasants – we are creating a new class, and it’s going to be those who can access and use technology.” - Iowa Superintendent John Carver

This week, David Nagel tweeted an article about Iowa's digital learning experiment. John Carver, an educational superintendent in Van Meter, Iowa, has pushed a laptop initiative to replace textbooks. Carver states in the article that he sees students more focused and interested in learning because laptops encourage learning in the way kids today are used to: by looking up information on the internet. I am not sure if I completely agree with dispelling textbooks from the classroom (although I never liked them much as a student), but I do think that it is important that we teach students how to use the internet to look for reliable sources and discern a "good" source from a bad one. Carver notes at the end of the article that the next step into his laptop initiative is to study the affects of using laptops as a primary information source through MRI scans, so it seems as of yet they have not recorded any scientific, research-based results.

I do think that the above quote, however, is very interesting, especially considering education from an urban educator's standpoint. I do believe Carter is correct when he says that what will be the next divide is access and being able to use technology. If our students are coming from a background where technology is not accessible, and we want them to be successful in obtaining careers and possibly social mobility, then it will be an essential life skill to be able to skillfully use technology, the internet, and laptops. Again, I am not sure I agree with Carter's notion to completely rid the classroom of all textbooks, as I feel they could be used as a reference in the classroom, but I do believe that this notion of computer and technology skills being essential to the success of our students in the "real world" is spot on. Part of the reason why I want to be an urban educator is to address generational poverty and give my students some skills to be social mobile, and computer and technology skills are and will be a huge part of that. I will be interested to see how Carver's thoughts and laptop initiative play out and affect student learning, either for the better or worse.



The article:
http://iowaindependent.com/57295/one-to-one-schools-%E2%80%98step-through-the-looking-glass%E2%80%99