Clearwater High School's unprecedented plan to arm its 2,100-plus student body with the devices nears fruition, with the Kindles now stacked in a computer lab and each labeled with a student's name.
As the school gets ready to distribute them next week the stakes — and questions — are more real than ever. Amazon confirms no other high school has attempted such a feat.
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[Principal Keith] Mastorides hoped to have the e-books in students' hands earlier, but publishers of its English and math textbooks and supplementary science materials are taking longer than planned to load the textbooks onto the Kindles — each one tailored to the individual students' course load.
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...a pilot program between Amazon and seven universities across the U.S. that ended this summer yielded mixed results that might give unabashed champions of the Kindle's educational utility pause.
The Kindle "is not ready for prime time," Arizona State University professor Ted Humphrey told the Arizona Republic in June.
Amazon spokeswoman Stephanie Mantello said Wednesday that the company received concerns from student feedback about annotating text and font sizes, among other things.
The principal says that there are big differences between college and high school. Fine.
However, we're not sure that the following issues are different for a high school student, a college student, or faculty member in a high school or at a university.
+ Overall Ease of Use of the E-Reader, Screen Size/Clarity Allowing a User to Read for Extended Periods
+ Inability to View Images (Example: a Science Textbook) in Color
+ Easy Access to the Web (Entering URLs For Example), Will Students Have to Always Have a Laptop and Kindle Ready to Go?
+ Being Able to Cite Content with the Required Info
are just a few examples.
However, what we're most surprised about after reading the article is the principal of Clearwater High School having no idea until recently about the Kindle trials that took place at several universities last year. You would think that someone (faculty member, school board member, a student, a parent, a principal at another school, or the principal himself) would have read about the tests during the past year and shared the info with the principal.
We would also think monitoring several sources for articles about e-books, e-book readers, e-books in schools, and related topics on a day-to-day or week-by-week basis as the idea to give each student a Kindle was being discussed and decided. Finally, not only can you set up alerts (or use RSS feeds) on the web but the Clearwater High School Library provides databases where a user can create an alert. Also, while we (ResourceShelf) don't focus exclusively on e-books, e-readers etc. there are several blogs that do.
Our favorite is TeleRead. In other words, let the blog editor(s) do the filtering for you.* The Kindle tests results VERY likely would have been discovered using one or more e-book blogs. Btw, in case you're wondering, we posted a number of stories about using Kindles at the university level. (-:
Of course, it's one thing for one person to have the needed or required info but the next step, sharing the info, is another story.
In the past few years with the rise of social bookmarking and now social media it has become very easy to share info with close friends or total strangers who have similar interests. In fact, a part of the fuel that has seen Facebook become a massive success (the same for Twitter although not even close to Facebook in terms of the number of active users) is the ability to share data and information in many formats using a variety of devices. The rapid growth of mobile allowing users to share info from anywhere at anytime is due to some degree by the growth of social media. The opposite is also true.
If mobile and GPS/LBS wasn't available services like Forsquare or GoWalla would probably not exist. Facebook and Twitter would also have fewer users. Right now and even more so in the next year or two, tweeting and other social media will become easily accessible at 40K feet. You might even be able to check-in to various locations as you fly close to or over various cities, bodies of water, etc. At least it's something to do on a long flight. (-:
However, sharing info online using a bulletin board, newsgroup, email discussion list, IM group, etc. were around (and are still being used effectively) long before Facebook or Twitter were even thought of by the founders of each company.
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