As technology evolves and becomes increasingly widespread into our lives it seeps into our classrooms as well. Generally, there is an accepted idea that the further we develop our technology and the more it becomes integrated into every day lives, the easier life becomes. The same holds true in the classroom. The more ‘tools’ there are in a classroom, the more likely parents will think their kids are learning more.

However, this is not necessarily true.

Audry Waiters responded to Apple’s press conference about their new program to create digital textbooks for the ipad. Obviously, the idea of digital textbooks isn’t groundbreaking, people have begun to read digital for a few years now. Waiter’s explained that when Apple claimed that they are going to ‘change everything’ it was the wrong choice of words.

When you simply convert everything to digital format, not much is changed. Students are still reading the same material in the same way. Information simply being entered into students’ minds. No holistic or critical thinking.

If we want to continue to use enhanced technology in schools we mine as well take advantage of what we can do with digital text, Anne Eisenberg suggests. Digital text has the ability to be interactive, allowing students to learn more (especially those that don’t thrive in the current school system.)

Much like what we talked about last week in relation to Howard Reingold’s article Learning, Playing, Designing: Video Games in School. The idea of teaching like a video game is in essence interactive learning

Vikram Savkar claimed “We want students to measure a chapter not by how much the read, but by how much they learn.” While this is a nice sentiment, for textbooks to really change, the school system has to change as well.