E-Books

Sarah: So what do you think about switching over to electronic textbooks in the classroom?

Peter: That’s a really good question, it’s one I've been debating myself for quite some time. I think, I’m mostly for it because I think the textbooks tend to be quite heavy to carry around, students carry a lot, have to carry a lot of them around. And having it in a digital form is much easier for students to access, it’s very convenient. They can carry most of their textbooks in one kind of tablet or one on their phones and access it anywhere. And it's easily ... obviously easily transportable but also easily accessible wherever you are really. I think it’s also with technology improving, you can change the format of the reading that you’re doing in the textbook and the font sizes change and you can highlight and change text if you need to. I’ve also started using it myself and I think it’s become much easier taking notes, I just open up a document next to it and add notes as I read. Yeah, I’m mostly for it. What about you?

Sarah: I see the advantages for it as well but I also see many disadvantages. First disadvantage I see is, students if it’s on an electronic device they'll be more tempted to do other things other than what they're supposed to be doing with their textbook. As well is I see as a problem for writing in the book as far as notes. Although you can write notes in there, it’s hard to reference back to them or hard to reference back certain pages, because I myself have used electronic textbook in the past and found that for regular books as far as reading, it’s great but textbooks it’s very difficult in the class if some people have regular textbooks and some people have electronic textbooks, trying to figure out what page everyone is on because if you have different text sizes then perhaps it'll be a different page numbers and it just makes it more difficult for trying to all be on the same page.

Peter: Yeah, I can kind of see your point. Although, what I do like about the electronic textbook so that they’ve got a lot of interactive material that you can directly link to the text that you're using like any animated materials, videos, other online material that you can access immediately whereas if you have a book you don’t have that more interactive component. And as a teacher I think it’s easier for me to add anything as the lesson goes on or as the course proceeds to just add more things to it, whereas with a textbook you're kind of more bound I guess, you have to stick to the text and the online experience just opens up many more possibilities, I think. And it’s all in the same medium so you know that I find really great.

Sarah: Yeah, I would agree with you and I think that’s the way the future is going, definitely for education is to go, they're calling it paperless, I think. I know many schools in the U. are going paperless where they're doing all electronic things in the classroom. They all have iPads so it’s very interesting.

Peter: Yeah, it is. The only concern that I haven’t really thought about carefully enough I guess before is that with just reading online and accessing things online, I think students they don’t write - physically write things anymore. It’s all typing and looking or engaging with things in a different way than before where people uses to take notes, actively think about things and write it down, making their own notes, which I think is a really useful skill to have. Like even if you type notes online it’s not the same as writing them out and keeping a diary as it were of your notes. What do you think about that?

Sarah: I would definitely agree with you, especially in language learning. It's very important to have the skill of writing and if you’re not doing that in the classroom then chances are you’re probably not doing it on your own later either.

Peter: Yeah. Yeah.