E-textbooks Will Never Replace Good Teaching

Hands getting not so 'dirty' CREDIT: Maine DOE

Give me a stick and a patch of dirt and I can teach a child to read. That’s a popular refrain in the world of education and it holds true today. While a lot of noise (and hyperbole) is being made about Apple’s new, democratic e-book/e-textbook platform, we must not forget the basics. As an educator with more than six years in the classroom teaching science and language, I believe this is something that must be kept in mind.

To its credit, Apple is doing a good thing with its e-book platform. Never before has there been such an easy tool to create e-books and their subset, e-textbooks. The ability for users to drop in pictures, diagrams, interactive 3D models and HTML5 code is laudable. This is sure to bring about a dynamic e-book and e-textbook ecosystem. In fact, users have already downloaded 350,000 e-books using the software according to reports.

For the past 30 years, education has been adopting technology in the classroom. It started in earnest with those first Apple IIes in computer labs and has now grown to smart boards and, in some schools, tablets for every child. Technology is a wonderful thing that has the ability to convey the world’s information in a dynamic, exciting way. Of course, kids today are completely tuned into this as they have grown up with Internet-connected devices and many could run laps around even the most computer-literate adult.

Good, but there's more to it SOURCE: BBC

However, technology in the classroom, including e-textbooks, is not a panacea to all our educational woes. Countless numbers of applications and web sites exist with learning tools for reading, math and science. Though, as I have oftentimes experienced, the myriad of applications that promise to create a virtual science experiment fall flat for one fundamental reason: they are virtual. Sure, they are excellent ways to introduce basic practices and principals, but they leave little room to experiment outside of what has been programmed.

Students must be given the ability to get their hands dirty. They must be given an opportunity to make mistakes with real consequences. Of course, I’m not talking about fatal lab explosions, but they need more than a game-like text box or cartoon Einstein asking them to try again. This is something that today’s technology really can’t offer. Whenever I plan a science lesson, I only start with these sorts of virtual tools, but then move into the real world and plan real experiments.

What the creators of these technologies need to do is become even more innovative. It’s not all about games and simulations; it’s about the power of the technology. Imagine if Apple or some crafty programmer thinks up a way to share real experimental results with all the other users of the same e-textbook. That’s collaboration. What if instead of playing a boring, uncreative trivia game at the end of chapter, students were tasked with designing their own game that could be shared with others?

These last questions come back not to technology, but to the person in charge of the show: the teacher. If a student has an effective teacher they are much more likely to succeed (see here). Of course, what makes an effective teacher is another question entirely and there are as many answers to that as there are pundits. However, one thing everyone can agree on is that teachers must first of all be competent and comfortable in what they are teaching. Many teachers, especially in primary where all subjects are taught by one person, are challenged by teaching areas that they themselves are not comfortable in. The same can be said about the use of technology.

Teachers must be well versed in the subjects they are teaching and properly taught to use the technological tools they have. The first need could be met by ending the one-teacher-fits-all model of primary education and the second met by a high investment in continual teacher training. Indeed, the best teachers are students themselves.

So, it’s not ‘give me an e-texbook and I’ll make an aeronautical engineer,’ but rather ‘give me a caring teacher with the proper tools and skills and the aeronautical engineer will make herself.’

Related posts:

1. On-line K-12 Education Becoming Viable in the US
2. Live Gamer Melds In-Game E-Commerce with Advertising
3. Ultra-cheap Computers to Inspire Future Programmers
4. Dragon TV: Virtual Assistants in the Living Room
5. PlaySpan：Global Monetization-as-a-Service Platform