As the financial deficit continues to rattle California, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has set his sights on new target: printed textbooks. He wants to terminate them all and replace them with digital learning materials by the fall to save the state money.
That’s one of his latest plans, dubbed the Digital Textbook Initiative, a move that he says would reduce more than the $350 million California spends every year on educational materials by making free, open-source digital textbooks available for the state’s high school math and science classes.
"Kids, as you all know, today are very familiar with listening to their music digitally and online and to watch TV online, to watch movies online, to be on Twitter and participate in that and on Facebook and all of those kinds of things," Schwarzenegger recently told students at Calabasas High School. "The textbooks are outdated, as far as I’m concerned and there’s no reason why our schools should have our students lug around these antiquated and heavy and expensive textbooks. California is the home of Silicon Valley. We are the world leader in technology and innovation, so we can do better than that."
But how do teachers feel about this initiative? It depends on who you ask. While some administrators and educators think this idea is long overdue, others say the initiative may have promise but lacks the money and resources to pull off effectively at the present time.
“Providing digital textbooks to students is an attractive idea,” said David Sanchez, president of the California Teachers Association, “but it needs to be done in a way that is accessible to all students … In our current budget crisis, it’s unlikely that schools will have the resources to download and print this material for every student.”
Technology has been creeping into the education realm for decades, but only in the past dozen years have there been such advances that have revolutionized the way students learn. Across the country, universities and K-12 schools have been launching programs that utilize social networking sites such as Twitter, and put laptops and mobile devices such as iPhones and iPods in the hands of students.
The governor’s free digital textbook initiative marks the first-ever in the nation, and other states may follow suit in an effort to save money and improve 21st-century learning. By having textbooks online or downloadable through an electronic reader such as the Kindle, students have immediate access to scientific advances and current events — such the Iranian election or stem-cell research — and teachers won’t have to wait years for the next edition of a textbook for those updates to be published.
A number of nonprofits already offer free open-source, content online but the initiative, some teachers say, will make it standard and give students around-the-clock access to material from anywhere.
Some teachers have already begun the transition. For instance, Patti Harris, an English teacher at Calabasas High School, uses a Kindle every day to read to her students. She has 50 titles on her digital reader including stories by authors such as Mark Twain and Edgar Allen Poe.
