Electronic Textbooks
Bill to Mandate Electronic Textbooks:
I am senator Slover and I stand firmly as affirmation on the bill to mandate electronic textbooks. Electronic textbooks will be the answer to economic struggles in schools all across California. Not only will this action cut down expenses on paper, textbooks, and the fees for missing textbooks, but it will help make money for other departments of education. A study, by ALA.org, comparing prices of textbooks and an e-book shows that a textbook is approximately double the price of an average e-book. Many schools make it mandatory that students haul their textbooks from home to school every day, which in many cases can result to a strain in the students’ backs. In an article from nytimes.com, a reporter looked into this study and wrote “Heavy backpacks don’t just zap children of their energy that would be better used doing schoolwork or playing sports but lugging them around every day can also lead to chronic back pain, accidents and possibly lifelong orthopedic damage.” (Jane Brody, nytimes.com) The federal Consumer Product Safety Commission calculated that carrying a 12-pound backpack to and from school and lifting it 10 times a day for an entire school year puts a cumulative load of 21,600 pounds on the students’ bodies. Not only will textbooks put a strain on the backs of students everywhere, but it will also leave less room in backpacks for other important school supplies. E-books don’t only weigh 1-2 pounds, but also have much easier accessibility and portability as well as many different features like searching keywords, highlighting, annotations, zoom, and many more things. Another study shows that students of the Riverside Unified School District who used an interactive, digital version of an Algebra 1 textbook scored 20 percent higher on the California Standardized test vs. students who learned with print textbooks during the 2011-2012 school year. Using e-books have been proven to help enhance the students’ grades! A
I am senator Slover and I stand firmly as affirmation on the bill to mandate electronic textbooks. Electronic textbooks will be the answer to economic struggles in schools all across California. Not only will this action cut down expenses on paper, textbooks, and the fees for missing textbooks, but it will help make money for other departments of education. A study, by ALA.org, comparing prices of textbooks and an e-book shows that a textbook is approximately double the price of an average e-book. Many schools make it mandatory that students haul their textbooks from home to school every day, which in many cases can result to a strain in the students’ backs. In an article from nytimes.com, a reporter looked into this study and wrote “Heavy backpacks don’t just zap children of their energy that would be better used doing schoolwork or playing sports but lugging them around every day can also lead to chronic back pain, accidents and possibly lifelong orthopedic damage.” (Jane Brody, nytimes.com) The federal Consumer Product Safety Commission calculated that carrying a 12-pound backpack to and from school and lifting it 10 times a day for an entire school year puts a cumulative load of 21,600 pounds on the students’ bodies. Not only will textbooks put a strain on the backs of students everywhere, but it will also leave less room in backpacks for other important school supplies. E-books don’t only weigh 1-2 pounds, but also have much easier accessibility and portability as well as many different features like searching keywords, highlighting, annotations, zoom, and many more things. Another study shows that students of the Riverside Unified School District who used an interactive, digital version of an Algebra 1 textbook scored 20 percent higher on the California Standardized test vs. students who learned with print textbooks during the 2011-2012 school year. Using e-books have been proven to help enhance the students’ grades! A