The Digital Textbook Case

Abel Real attributes his transformation from likely high school dropout to nursing student at East Carolina University to classroom technology. Real, a self-proclaimed success story from poverty-stricken Greenville, North Carolina, shared his experience with a school laptop program that introduced him to the power of technology before the House Committee on Education Labor yesterday at a hearing on “The Future of Learning: How Technology is Transforming Public Schools.”

When Real was 13, both his parents were incarcerated and his two older brothers had already dropped out of high school. By sophomore year, Real was so distracted by his torn family that he was sure he would repeat his brothers’ mistakes. However, when a health care teacher introduced him to technology and his school gave him a laptop, his life began to turn around. Even when “home life was a mess,” Real could instant message his classmates and teachers after school to work on projects and ask questions through his computer, he said. The laptop program was a “portal to a new life,” in his words.

He used the laptop to access information ranging from virtual university tours to career options to how to tie a necktie. Before his school system incorporated technology into classrooms, the average college attendance rate was 26 percent, but when Real graduated in 2008, 94 percent of his class moved on to college. “Technology is not a luxury in society; it is a necessity,” he said.

The other witnesses echoed Real’s testament to the power of classroom technology. Aneesh Chopra, Chief Technology Officer in the White House Office for Science and Technology Policy, called incorporating technology into American classrooms a “policy priority of the president.” Virginia, where Chopra recently served as secretary of technology, is already using web-based tools to lower textbook costs and cover “areas key to Virginia’s economic growth,” he said.

When Governor Tim Kaine challenged a panel of scientists and engineers to evaluate Virginia’s physics, chemistry, and engineering curriculum in 2007, they found that topics such as simulation and nuclear physics were missing from their textbooks. About a dozen authors subsequently volunteered to write ten chapters on the topics in an open-source wiki to supplement traditional textbooks. Albemarle County schools purchased the virtual chapters, bundled as a “FlexBook,” along with low cost “netbook” computers for each physics student, Chopra said. Pooling teachers’ knowledge in supplemental chapters is more cost effective than purchasing new, updated textbooks. The flexibility of the virtual books allows teachers to choose content based on experience. As long as states “rigorously review” the content in an objective way, the marketplace can determine the best way to select and distribute the material, Chopra said.

Lisa Short, a science teacher at Gaithersburg Middle School in Maryland, uses a different tool to engage her students. After using an interactive whiteboard for one year, Short can no longer imagine attempting to captivate her students with a plain blackboard. She demonstrated how the whiteboard incorporates various learning styles—visual, auditory, tactile, kinesthetic—in one lesson for the committee. The whiteboard allows Short to embed video and audio clips, build maps, and record notes without wasting paper. On top of that, every student wants to go up and participate at the board, she said.

Activote, a multiple-choice question feature, helps her anonymously survey her students’ knowledge from their seats. The program records individual answers so the instructor can determine if particular students are consistently missing questions and may need extra help, Short said. Committee members tried Activote themselves and voted on the correct answer to a question about the proportion of classrooms that use interactive whiteboards: it’s 16 percent. American schools need to secure more funding and train more teachers to reach the United Kingdom’s level of classroom technology, Short said, citing the fact that 70 percent of classrooms in the U.K. use digital whiteboards. Classroom technology has the ability to not only motivate students like Real, but also to “truly change the profession of teaching,” she said.

Tags: Innovation, STEM Education

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