Despite challenges, digital textbooks offer far-reaching benefits, according to educators
No one is putting pen to paper in Nadia Zananiri’s ninth-grade world history class.
Instead, every student is hunched over the glowing screen of a digital tablet or staring into a laptop display. One is even plugging away on his phone.
A handful of textbooks sit in baskets underneath students’ seats, ignored and unopened.
It may not look like it, but the students are all busy at work. Online, they’re typing up assignments about the crops, animals and diseases European explorers brought with them to the New World.
This is what school work looks like now that Miami-Dade County schools has launched an ambitious program to get portable, digital devices into the hands of all 350,000 students in the district–part of a state mandate to bring more technology into classrooms.
(Next page: Pros and cons of digital textbooks)