E-Books in a School Setting

After reading the article titled, "Schools beware, the E-book band wagon", I have a much different view on e-books than before. Before reading, I thought e-books were the perfect way to integrate technology into our otherwise so print-dependent school studies. I now feel much differently. I especially agree with the points on how e-books may be extremely distracting. With Facebook and other websites that typically cause procrastination in students so accesible online, students would find it much harder to concentrate on the work necessary to get done. "Even dedicated e-readers like the Kindle are incorporating more bells and whistles that have the effect of drawing a reader's attention away from the words." This may or may not cause them to lose sleep and not do as well in school. I also agree with the point that, "People read in a variety of ways... sometimes they skim pages to get a quick sense of the story or argument. Sometimes they search for the particular passage. Sometimes they skip back and forth between two or more sections of a text, making comparisons. And sometimes they take notes or highlight passages as they read." It's obvious that there are many different reading styles and textbooks allow for all these different ways. With e-books, it would be much harder to skip through different parts or chapters. Also, according to researchers at The University of Washington, "a printed book provides many subtle cues about a book's structure and contents. We make a 'cognitive map' of a physical book as we read it: 'When we read, we unconsciously note the physical location of information within a text and its spatial relationship to our location in the text as a whole." With e-books there is no sense of a cognitive map and therefore locating information in the text takes much longer than in a printed textbook. Many students would become fed up with the disarray of information from an e-book and without any textbooks in a school, e-books would be the only choice. Despite all these setbacks, I definitely think e-books are important for education. Much of our world today is highly based on technology and to completely prevent the use of e-books would be preposterous. Instead, I think both e-books and printed books are necessary for a student's education. Students need to be prepared to learn both ways. Overall, printed books are extremely important tools for education, more so than e-books.