eBooks - or not.

I've long been an advocate of e-Books.  I've pushed for us to adopt them in my district.  As an avid reader, I've dropped serious coin on books most of my life - I've got hundreds of them on shelves at home, and a couple hundred more from Kindle or the Apple Store (mostly Kindle, but I don't have a rational reason for why), and contrary to @anotherschwab's belief, I've read them all!

I've often said that books have their place.  But now I'm rethinking that.  Some.

I've bought enough eBooks to actually pay for a Kindle reader and an iPad, using the differential between the cost of an electronic copy of a book over the cost of the same book in paperback or hardback to make the calculation.  Yeah, I know - I don't actually own the book electronically, I just have a license to read the thing on my device - I can't really share it, give it away, or sell it back to a used book store.  In the end I don't care - having a hundred good books on a tablet, being able to port that wherever I go, and jump into a book (any book) whenever I want is, well, really cool.  And since I generally read multiple books at a time, it's also really convenient.

It's also convenient to know I have access to all those books on all of my devices.  Sitting in a meeting, pulling up something as a reference, and being able to search for that specific passage in that specific book is huge.  You can't do that with a book - unless you're meeting in a really good library!

The vision of empowering kids with this same vision - having all of their books on demand on a mobile device - is compelling to me.  Watching kids lug home a backpack full of textbooks is painful. Buying two copies of each textbook so they don't have to do that is unreasonable.  Let's quit killing trees, I say!

Last week I had the chance to visit an 8th grade class at a rural school I work with in northern California.  Every student there has a mobile device (a laptop), and teachers are becoming better and better at integrating them into their classrooms.  This particular 8th grade class was reading Frankenstein.  What I noticed when I visited was that some of the kids were reading on their netbooks, and some were reading a book - the teacher had given them the choice.  I just had to know what the kids thought about this - so I asked them. What I learned was interesting.

The vast majority of kids preferred reading a physical book over the same book (literally identical - everything is the same online as in the physical book) on their computer.  Their reasons were compelling.  I anticipated some nostalgic, emotional attachment to the feel, smell, and comfort of an actual book (I hear that a lot, mostly from adults).  But that wasn't their reasoning.

A number of kids said when they read online, they felt eye strain.  Some complained of getting headaches.  Many said the experience detracted from following the story - using the cursor to click an arrow and wait for the next page disrupted the flow of the story, and they didn't enjoy it as much.  Likewise, the clicking and waiting made it cumbersome to flip back a page or two to re-read a passage when they missed an element that became important to the story.  Some students worried about the effects of "blue light" and "radiation" - and I asked them to research that and see if these issues are true on modern led displays - I'm still waiting for their findings.

Now, these kids were reading from a netbook.  A good one (Acer B113), with a good screen.  But a netbook nevertheless.  And I'm not sure, if they had an eReader or a tablet that they would find the experience as detracting - I'm still leaning towards the contention that the experience is superior on a tablet to an actual book, but it appears these kids would disagree.  Some actually own Nooks, tablets, and Kindles - and they still say they prefer a book.

But the other thing that a number of kids mentioned, I wasn't anticipating.  They spend all day, every day, on their devices, using them for their assignments and schoolwork, for communicating and social networking, and for the myriad other things we do with them - making a phone call, for example.  Sometimes, they say, it's just nice to unplug and read an old-fashioned book!

As school leaders, we should take pause and listen to the kids.  Taking away their books, at least completely, may not be all that wise a decision.  Or, at least, we should be very careful about the device and the manner in which we migrate away from physical books.  After talking with the students at Grenada, I'm convinced that laptops are not a good replacement for a book.  I'm still holding out that tablets can be a viable alternative - but now, before I'd advocate that, I'd pilot it with some students.  And get their take.  Which brings up another thought - the devices themselves.  There's not a single device that meets all their needs.  I'm now thinking kids need both a laptop and a tablet (or eReader).  But that's an expensive proposition, and a thought for another post.

Will Richardson got me thinking.  Again.  How much of what we do in education is based on focusing on the needs of kids?  In a recent iteration of Will's Educating Modern Learners, he shared a couple articles related to thinking about the future of work.  Reality check - whatever we're doing in education, our kids' futures will involve employment - everyone's gotta make a livin'.  If, as educators, we're about preparing our students for the future, then we're ultimately, at least in part, preparing them to be competitive in the employment arena.  Competitive - because nobody ever interviewed for a job when they were the only candidate.  (Well, except for uncle Guido's nephew for that job at the concrete factory).  to be competitive, students need to be fully enabled learners.  And the "other part", our students' personal lives outside of work, that place where hobbies and interests and passions reside for purely personal reasons?  That involves learning as well.


We can't predict what each of our students will do in their adult life.  We can't know all of their passions, interests, and future opportunities.  Because of that, paraphrasing Seymour Papert, we might quibble over the billionth of all the information in the world that we feel is essential for our kids to know from school, or ultimately compile a list of all the questions we want to believe they might need to be able to recite a correct answer.  But we will most certainly miss things that many of them will need in their futures.  We can, however, anticipate that they will have to learn new skills, new concepts, and new ways of doing things in whatever they do.  And the better we prepare them to be learners, to be able to assimilate information and develop knowledge in unfamiliar situations, the better we help them develop into experts at becoming experts, then the better off our students will be.

Kids and Ninja Warriors

A few weeks ago, I shared a YouTube video with my wife Julee (first grade teacher).  The video showed a young kid running through a "Ninja Warrior" style obstacle course in her backyard.  Julee thought this would be fun for her students, and as we talked about it, she thought, "What better way to teach kids about some math?"  She came up with a bunch of concepts - the idea of time (how long is a minute), greater than, less than....  I suggested some ideas about data collection, and the project was on.  She designed an obstacle course around the school playground, I built a balance beam, and we set the thing up just before school.

Almost immediately, kids started asking questions.  "What's going on?"  "What's this?"  "Can I play?"  I only answered the last question.  "Sure - but don't hang on the hula hoop - you can just jump through it."  One student asked, "What do we do?"  Another answered immediately "It's an obstacle course!"  In no time at all, the students organized, figured out a path (it wasn't the path we'd designed), and they were off and running.

While watching them play, try out the obstacles, and invent ways to use the stuff we'd laid out along with the playground equipment, I was reminded about the nature of play.  We don't let kids do it much.  And they love it.  No prompting, no rules, no feedback from me or any adults, they were able to figure out a way to put into their play, in an organized fashion, all this new stuff (cones, hoops, balance beam, a few ropes, a hula hoop) that just showed up.  

When Julee brought her students out to actually run the course, it was the same thing - they had a blast, and they all cheered for each other, took data on how everyone ran through the course, and before we could prompt them for anything, were already at work analyzing the data and making some conclusions.

Kids from Julee's teaching partner's class also came out, and they made signs to cheer on those running the course.  No prompting, no cajoling, just kids getting a chance to move, think, be creative, learn some things, and have fun.

Isn't that what school is all about?