Fixing School Libraries.

     I've spent a couple of days now over the last couple of weeks working with my mother at the library where she works. It's an elementary school library, which means that at the end of the year, most of the work she is doing is handling, cataloging, and storing textbooks. What I've realized while I was helping her is that the entire textbook system is completely ridiculous, and needs to be re-vamped. My brother has written on the subject of the broken education subject HERE, and while I agree that incorporating games into the curriculum is a great way to encourage students to learn, I think that starting with the books they are learning from is the way to go about fixing education. So, here I go.
     Next week, Google is launching its Chromebook, a laptop based on the new Chrome OS. I've been using a Chromebook to update this blog since I started it, and today, it gave me an idea for a complete new infrastructure for books. The basic idea is that Chromebooks operate entirely in the cloud, using only the internet to do its work, rather than depending on built in storage space.
     Every year, the library spends more than $200 per student on textbooks. Now, let's imagine that rather than spending that money every year, the school invested it into Chromebooks, which cost about $200 each. The laptops would be bar coded, inventoried, and checked out, exactly the same as the textbooks, but the secret is that the books would be designed specifically for the purpose of education. Every Chromebook is designed to link to a central server on campus, and on that server is the entire curriculum, every textbook is digitized, the workbooks are webpages, the homework comes in emails, and multiple choice grades itself.  Students would keep their laptops through the course of the year, charging them in class, and if the teacher requires it, using their 8-hour battery overnight for homework time. The Chromebooks are designed with built-in 3G connectivity, which means that students who cannot afford internet at home could register for the 3G through the schools, so they could do homework.
     Two years ago, the elementary school upgraded it's math curriculum, to the latest standards. (I'll talk about the quality of the standards another time) The school had to buy entirely new books for every student they had. If, however, they were using Chromebooks, all the curriculum update would take is the installation of new software on the central server, saving literally tons of paper every time the curriculum is updated. On top of that, the next year, the publisher told the school district that the math they had used for the year wasn't the right set, and sent them an entirely new set of papers! That's another ton of paper wasted, as well as more trouble for librarians! With Chromebooks, if there was a mistake like that, The solution would waste, at most a case of CDs, and at least, nothing, because the update could come over the internet, just like updates on any program on your computer.
     A lot of people worry about students (especially elementary age) being on the internet. That's entirely reasonable, but the Chromebook can be developed to have network controls to keep students on a safe-network, so that the computer can only connect to the school's server. Or, pending parent sign-off, etc. the book could be allowed onto the full internet, or have various levels of parental control allowed.
     Another interesting aspect of the Chromebooks is the centralized login. To log on to Chrome OS, you enter in your Gmail address and password, and all of your information is linked to that. For this system, the students (and teachers, staff, etc.) would each have a login account, which would store grades, homework, bookmarks (literal bookmarks in the e-books, for example) it could have links to a student's favorite educational games attached to the account, or a list of reminders on the home page for upcoming events, or homework. The real advantage of this is that without having to have the student's actual laptop, the parents or teacher of that student can look it up from literally anywhere that there is internet, regardless of whether or not they were using a Chromebook. Students could also use their home computers to do their homework, if one is available. On the other side of that coin, since every laptop is identical, and can all use the same accounts, if a student forgets (or "forgets") their Chromebook at home, the teacher can simply have a few spare laptops in the class. The students can log in and do their work anyway.
     Now, I'm not saying that libraries should be abolished, or that all books should be burned, or anything silly like that. Rather, I'm suggesting that we ditch the business model of replacing books every two years, and only buy books that have a genuine lifespan. If we focused on a system that is built to last rather than being recycled (or sometimes thrown away) every two years, we can focus on the education, and not the money-making. The budget required for books would be cut in half (there would of course need to be some laptops replaced each year) and all of that money could be spent on other things, like after school programs, or art supplies. The Chromebook cloud computing system could make our schools more efficient, less expensive, and more fun for students, and who wouldn't want that?