Part of the reason I find this interesting is that after brunch on Sunday, our discussion was centered on 20th century U.S. history, and how many students never get to that point in their studies, we segued from this into a discussion on how textbooks, because the state of Texas buys so many of them, are written with Texas schoolchildren being the target audience. Is this the future of textbooks? Instead of buying books, buying CDs/DVDs of our texts? On one hand, having them on the computer is good (I think a laptop often takes up less space on the desk than a text book) but I worry about copyrights and duplication. In time, we might find that copies of the books on CD/DVD to be more expensive than the paper versions we have now.
The other thing is whether or not you really want 5th and 6th graders carrying around $1,400 worth of computer equipment with them. We already have problems in this country with theft and robbery -- do we really want to lower the age bracket to 5th and 6th graders?
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