Educational software has been a big, big disaster area for certain publishers, but could it be that they’ll have no choice but to return to the scene? Here are two very revealing paragraphs from the Book Standard‘s excellent article on the Arizona school that threw out paper textbooks in favor of laptops:
Despite the growing interest in e-textbooks in education, the teachers at Empire took the digital learning experience a step further by outlining a curriculum that relies almost entirely on educational software and the Internet. Jeremy Gypton, a social-studies teacher at the school, and member of the committee that established Empire’s curriculum, said that the primary reason digital textbooks weren’t purchased is because they weren’t an improvement on traditional textbooks. After talking to sales reps from some of the major textbook publishers like Houghton Mifflin and Glencoe (a division of McGraw-Hill), Gypton says one thing became clear: Most of the major textbook publishers didn’t offer anything more in digital form than they did in print. “Why get a computer and just put the same information on it?” Gypton asks.
With this in mind, Gypton and company invested Empire’s budget in educational software and programs provided by, among others, a company called ABC-CLIO. A publisher of reference websites and databases, with a focus on history and social studies, ABC-CLIO is a subscriber-based service that allows users access to topic-specific websites. These websites, according to Gypton, “eclipse a textbook” in both breadth and depth.
This approach didn’t work for all the teachers, but it seems to have been successful enough to make one wonder if this could be the start of a trend? The purpose of schools, after all, is to educate students, not provide a market for books, electronic or otherwise. If I were a traditional textbook publisher, I’d take a very close look at the Arizona experiment.
