Time to dump the textbooks?

A school in Arizona has eliminated the use of textbooks in favor of issuing each student a laptop computer. Empire High School, a new school in Vail, Ariz., near Tuscson, has provided each of its 340 students an Apple iBook computer instead of bulky books.

School officials said that they expect the computers will help students engage more in learning. However, they found that certain skills they expected -- organizational skills anad basic software proficiency -- were lacking. Still, the switch means the school won't use money on texts, which are often heavy, generic or quickly obsolete.

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So is it time to dump textbooks in favor of other learning materials? Textbook publishers have increasingly provided supplemental resources, such as CD-ROMs or Web site access, for audio and video as well as online activities for students. But maybe we should at least consider eliminating some textbooks.

They are too big and unable to be customized, so teachers don't use them. My school adopted a new literature anthology two years ago for a class I teach. It was bigger than before (almost 1,000 pages) yet some of the major pieces, namely Homer's Odyssey, had been hacked even more than before. So now we don't even use the anthology for the Odyssey; we use a separate unabridged book. That does not make much sense. If publishers allowed total customization -- sort of like Build-a-Bear -- the problem would be solved, but the books would be exceptionally expensive or would not be durable.

Some courses benefit from constantly updated materials. In the sciences and social studies, information changes more rapidly than can be included in texts. Here is where Internet resources and current information would be more useful. Our school uses Newsweek magazine and UpFront, a current events magazine for teens from The New York Times, as classroom texts in its contemporary world problems course.

We should teach students how to navigate information in the digital world. Of course we should not eliminate books. But if we can access better information and do so faster while teaching students skills that will be useful in their educational and work lives, I think that is a good move.

I look forward to seeing how schools manage these problems and if there is an increase in learning. In the meantime, I will continue to try to supplement the textx in my own classroom.

-- Wenatchee, Wash.