More classrooms will be going digital in the future.

With the launch of a world first Backpack.net centre, more students can soon throw out their textbooks and replace them with tablet PCs.


The digital textbooks of the future have not just gotten students excited about them, teachers are all for going high-tech as well.

Leong Se Yean, Mandarin teacher, Catholic High School, said, "They have become more proactive when it comes to lessons. They're able to raise better in-depth questions. Because of these computer lessons which incorporate sound, music and pictures, the lessons actually become more interesting.

"Students become more interested. So their desire to learn has improve through the use of computer."

More schools expected to swop textbooks for digital ones

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Insane Politics

While I'm all for progress in education, particularly since my two children arrived on the scene, I can't help thinking that this scenario being realised as a standard is some way off. Vanishingly distant, actually.

Let's just have a look at a few potential problems.

1 Cost. Who's going to pay? The parents? Many just can't. The schools? I can't speak for elsewhere, but in UK the state schools would need immense budget increases to be able to afford just the infrastructure, leet alone the devices themselves. Hello Central Government, hello tax increases. Always a vote-getter, that one. The likely political response: pay lip service, "monitor" the situation and always always always say it will be examined in more detail after the next election.

2 Chicken-and-egg time. Will the ebook textbooks be available when the hardware is rolled out, or will the publishers wait until the tablets are purchased, which will mean they'll be published for no reason since there's no software. Back to Central Government. Perhaps they'll commission a study before the next election.

3 Children. I love my children, but they have next to no appreciation of financial value or the care of things. At 5 and 3, I'll admit they're not the target for this kind of initiative, despite their already scary competence (and fearlessness) in front of a computer. Let's restrict ourselves to 11 and over. I don't know about anyone else, but my recollection of those years is punctuated by memories of losing things, dropping things, breaking things, forgetting things (oh my, are we going to let the kids take "their" Tablets home?) and goodness knows what else. I'd suggest we'd be lucky to see more than half of 11 year-olds turn up for class with their machines intact, working and batteries charged. I'm assuming, by the way, that battery technology will have improved so that a Tablet can stay up and wirelessly connected for an entire school day, a feat my M200 would fail to achieve by several hours.

I don't like to come across as overtly cynical, but this strikes me as a pure PR play with little chance of implementation without major technological and political changes, either here in the UK or elsewhere. I read today that our Government has hailed the increase in secondary (11 year-old) school entrant literacy to 83% That's one of the most depressing statistics I've seen for a long time. One child in six entering secondary education in this country is functionally illiterate. maybe we should spend the money on them. Or perhaps we should just give them a tablet PC.