Paperless classroom becoming a reality

They have weighed down satchels, been hurled across classrooms and defaced with lewd graffiti by schoolchildren across the ages. But the humble textbook looks to be going the way of the Walkman — in California at least.

Arnold Schwarzenegger has announced that pupils will soon only be learning from digital texts, and experts in the UK said the paperless classroom is becoming a reality here too.

“Today our kids get their information from the internet, downloaded onto their iPods, and in Twitter feeds to their cellphones ... So why are California’s public school students still forced to lug around antiquated, heavy, expensive textbooks?” asked the ‘Terminator’ actor, in his capacity as state governor. The move will substantially reduce the $350m California spends on school books and other instructional materials each year.

Where California leads, others have often followed. The sunshine state added avocado to sushi rolls, popularised jogging, and, in Silicon Valley, revolutionised the world of computing.

Graham Taylor, director of educational and academic publishing at the Publishers’ Association, in the UK, said: “In this country, even more than in the US, there’s a 25-year history of making learning resources available digitally. I would estimate that 20 per cent of learning resources delivered to primary and secondary schools in the UK are already purely digital.

“That has probably been achieved mostly in the past 10 years. Ever since Tony Blair came in and talked about ‘education, education, education,’ at least £2bn has been invested in learning technology, and if things carry on in the same vein, perhaps 40 per cent of educational resources will be digital in 10 years time.”

Publishers such as Hodder Education already offer a range of online resources alongside conventional textbooks, and Pearson sells electronic versions of most of its textbooks, either in interactive form, or as a straight portable document format (pdf). Last year, Pearson earned £960m revenue from its digital products and services — around a fifth of its total revenue.

Internet not all pervasive

Many teachers also like the idea of not spending hours photocopying worksheets, and not teaching from old books annotated with pupils’ scribbles. But the textbook isn’t about to die a sudden death — especially not in the UK, where many children still do not have access to the internet at home and thus have every right to utter the postmodern excuse of not being able to download their homework.

“There’s this perception that everyone has a computer and internet access these days, but that is not the case. There are still one million children who don’t have a computer at home in England and Wales, which works out as over 30 per cent of the school population,” according to a spokeswoman for Becta, the government agency which promotes the use of IT in schools.

Although all UK schools now have broadband connections, IT provision is still nowhere near good enough to cope with a 100 per cent paperless classroom, according to analysts.

Becta says that schools currently average one computer between three students. But according to Ros Sutherland, Bristol University, co-author of ‘Improving Classroom Learning with ICT’, schools really need one computer per child if they are all using all digital resources.

Plus, she says, books offer something that digital resources just can’t replicate.

“You can flick back and forth in them quickly, you can scribble in them, it’s easy to share one between a number of students,” she said.

“Though theoretically electronic textbooks can be much more interactive, the current reality is that a lot of them are little more than pdf versions of the paper book,” she added.