Clearwater High School Goes Kindle

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(The article is password-protected. One has to register. I'd rather not.)

Kindles break. My first one took a fall and stopped working. Amazon replaced it overnight at their expense.

You quoted "lost," implying stolen. A stolen Kindle is useless to the thief. The owner notifies amazon, who removes the Kindle from the owner's account. All the thief can do, then, is read books that were already downloaded to the device.

Truly lost Kindles are no more a problem than truly lost books.

They are going to run into problems, however, porting some textbooks to the Kindle platform. It doesn't work well with tables, for example. There are workarounds for most of the issues,

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but much of them are tedious and labor-intensive.

They'd be better off using the iPad, but then they'd have to deal with the kids using it to surf porn and tweet in class.

I got the article through the front door.

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The Kindle is not considered acceptable for research. You can't scroll the pages, flip through pages easily, have an index, etc., do all the things you can do with books. The more I think about it, the more I think this particular choice could be a mistake. Unless they go with a more appropriate e-reader, the project might be deemed a failure, which could kill the concept, which would be a shame.

Al Stevens wrote:

Truly lost Kindles are no more a problem than truly lost books.

Isn't there a cost factor, though? I would think the schools would have to pay for replacements.

According to the article, parents can get insurance to cover off-campus losses. I don't know what kind of coverage they get otherwise.

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LC wrote:

Al Stevens wrote:

According to the article, parents can get insurance to cover off-campus losses. I don't know what kind of coverage they get otherwise.

I found the wording interesting. They can get insurance. As opposed to being required to get it?

As an aside, requirements haven't worked so well in school districts I've read about. For some reason, students have been able to take out equipment whether they bought insurance or not. Which came to light after the equipment was lost, stolen or misused.

It wasn't clear to me--perhaps I missed it--whether the schools would provide the Kindles or the parents would have to buy them. Or rent them. I don't even know how it works today with books. When I was a kid we rented school books.

But, I guess they're smart enough to figure all that out and get it covered. More to the point is, how effective will the medium be for learning as opposed to traditional books? I'm glad someone is trying it.

"...the kindle is a good start, but water always sinks to its lowest level here, so the students will probably carry around notebooks instead..." mentioned the goblin, thanking the thread started then, explaining "...if simply because one only has to ask oneself whether one wants something that only shows up pages or something that has that plus music, streams, chatting, internet, word, excel, etc., etc., etc., to see what's coming now...", for everything on a kindle can be retrieved anyway, even where locked for that matter, for one simply scans the page using a word recognition program in the same way one scans a book page to get an ebook page in the first place, adding "...besides, for the price of a kindle one gets a fully functional linux notebook here, no, the real advatage for going digital, besides cost, is the weight saving as in not having to carry those books around..."

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fleamailman wrote:

"...the kindle is a good start, but water always sinks to its lowest level here, so the students will probably carry around notebooks instead..."

That depends. The textbooks will be downloaded to the kindles and not available to just any laptop. From what I read, they will protect them accordingly.

fleamailman wrote:

for everything on a kindle can be retrieved anyway, even where locked for that matter, for one simply scans the page using a word recognition program in the same way one scans a book page to get an ebook page in the first place, adding

Surely you jest. A page-by-page scan of seven or eight 500 page textbook? Scanning from a kindle screen? The formulae? The tables? The code? It gives me the willies just to think about it.

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Surely you jest. A page-by-page scan ofseven or eight 500 page textbook? Scanning from a kindle screen? Theformulae? The tables? The code? It gives me the willies just to thinkabout it.

"...ah now, copying is always a simple division of "how many pages by how many people", for example, let's say it's ten students then those 500 pages become 50 pages does it not, and remember this only has to be done once, where after that the pirated copy exists, which however poor in itself it might be, is opensource and can by improved on, that is, integrated into whichever program one wishes..." mentioned the goblin who was already aware of that large number of books that were on word format already, that circulated freely on the internet, concluding "...anything can be copied now, students are very resourceful determined creatures are they not, and in the worse cases they fall back on their families with lines like "mum can you help me with my homework", um btw do you scanning then..."

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As a general rule, schools and other government entities avoid copyright infringement. There are "fair use" provisions that give them latitude with some materials, but the wholescale scanning of a textbook, paper or e-book, to get it onto a laptop is not among them. So, it they have legitimate digital rights to the book, why are they scanning it? The publisher would provide them the book in whatever format they need it.

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