Rift over e-books in the classroom

According to the ministry, the so-called e-books, which are becoming increasingly popular around the globe, will both reduce the heavy loads that schoolchildren have to carry to school each day, while also keeping pupils in sync with modern technologies.

Grzegorz Zurawski, press spokesman for the ministry, also believes that it will be more profitable for the publishers, as they will not have to cover printing and distribution costs.

Under the new regulations, publishers could release textbooks solely in digital form, whilst those which continue to be published in the old format must also have electronic editions.

The exception will be for pupils in the grades 1-3 (6 to 10-year-olds), who will continue to work primarily with printed textbooks and pens, so that proficiency in hand-writing does not fall by the wayside.

Nevertheless, reservations about the proposals for older pupils have already been voiced.

Piotr Marcisuk, chairman of the Polish Chamber of Books, believes that the plan is flawed.

“It will still be necessary to pay the authors the same price,” he says, noting that few students buy e-books and that few schools have the facilities to introduce sweeping changes at present.

Grazyna Gregorczyk, director of the Computer Assisted Education and Information Technology Centre in Warsaw, has similar reservations. She stresses that “unfortunately it is not the case” that every school desk is equipped with a computer that each pupil can use.

“Those schools are the exceptions,” she affirms.

Gregorczyk also expressed that there are questions relating to integrating the new technologies with actual problem-solving by the pupils themselves. She says that new teaching methods would have to be introduced, so as to marry the technologies with how pupils go about completing an exercise in computer format. (nh/jb)

Source: Rzeczpospolita