Pets

The new high school is the first in Arizona schools without textbooks

Empire High School in Vail, located just outside of Tucson, is the first of Arizona’s schools to be fully electronic. Instead of textbooks, the 350 students use wireless Apple laptops to research, organize their data, write and graph assignments, and create presentations in class.

Arizona’s Empire High is a new school with a blank slate. Arizona school officials could hire new teachers committed to technology-based teaching and buy computers instead of textbooks. Arizona school officials wanted to steer teachers away from regular textbook teaching, cover to cover, and gave area students the option of attending Empire or another school.

Having researched schools in other states before the all-electronic decision, school officials found students who were clearly more engaged in their studies and unusually excited about school. One of the reasons was that they took a more active part in the process of the lesson, instead of everything being “fed” to them. Another advantage of laptops over textbooks is that it takes five to six years for innovative information to make its way into textbooks, especially in science fields. Of the few fully electronic schools across the country, many are doing well from the perspective of students and educators. Arizona school officials clearly felt they could enhance their students’ educational experience with technology over textbooks.

Replacing textbooks with laptops for other Arizona schools would be costly at $850 each. For Empire, they took the usual cost of $500 to $600 per student for a full set of textbooks over four years, as well as the cost of a computer lab, and used this money to buy laptops and additional technology necessities.

The new Empire High Schools in Arizona had to face some new challenges and research was done to address them. They had 350 students, who needed to be continuously and reliably connected to the Internet at high speed. All laptops had to be configured to best fit the learning needs of the students. The necessary educational material had to be located on the Internet and integrated into the lesson plans. A method was needed for students to submit assignments over the Web. These were problems that they knew they had to solve before the school year started.

What Arizona school officials hadn’t planned for was a different kind of technology problem. It seems that many students who used home computers to play games, surf the Internet, and X-Box, had difficulty translating these skills to those needed in school, such as using word processing software, saving documents to specific locations, and being able to recover the files later. Skills training had to be added to the lesson plans.

For other schools that are interested in establishing an all-electronic school, Arizona school officials caution that it must be a public choice. Such drastic learning changes cannot be forced. Include parents and teachers in planning on the ground floor.

After a year, the system works well in general. Arizona plans to increase enrollment at Empire High to 750 students in the near future.

This information about Arizona schools is provided by http://www.schoolsk-12.com/

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *