Should We Replace Textbook with Tablets?

Should we replace textbooks with tablets?

Tablets are becoming more and more useful in our day life. People are trying to use tablets on many of the occasion. One of the opinions that are highly criticize negative and positively is replacing textbooks with tablets. Is replacing a tablet good or bad for the students? What are the advantages and disadvantages of the using a tablets in the school? We will discuss about how a tablets can help or harm the students.

        Tablets are very portable and it is very easy to carry around. You can simply put around 6,000 books into an 8GB tablet. In fact students are only required to own one tablet to carry all the books with them that they will need to learn. Due to the capacity of the storage that a tablet can hold, you will save a lot more by using your tablet as a book instead of having to purchase an actual textbook. Researches have shown that during the 2011-12 school year more than 13,700 US children, aged 5 to 18, were treated in hospitals and doctors' offices for backpack-related injuries (5,000 in emergency rooms) such as contusions, sprains, fractures, and strains to the back and shoulders. By owning a tablet that problem can simply solve which reduces all the weight needed by the textbooks with one simple tablet. What is more fascinating is tablet has more ability to let you interact with the content of the book that you cannot do the same with textbook. For example, some of the eBooks have video contents embedded within which enable users to understand more clearly. Moreover, eBooks on tablets can be easily updated to the latest edition of the book which can enable both professors and students to study about the most up to date material that book publishers can provide. Sometimes, it can be very hard for publishers to deliver textbooks to the school on time for every edition they have made. The result can sometimes make the schools have to use an obsoleted version of the textbooks. Another interesting thing about using tablets over textbooks is the functionality. There are many functions in tablets that we cannot find in the textbooks. Take the search feature as an example; we can easily skip through the painful process of what having to open the book page by page to find the exact content when we can simply search the keyword in the search feature. It will instantly find the related keyword that we want to search and show us the content of that page.  In addition to fast and portable, learning can be very fun using tablets. In a tablet, student can read and make note on the content without damaging the original content. They can simply make any note or highlight without worrying which later on they can erase those notes or highlights easily. Moreover, the tablets has some really nice app which enable the reader to read in night time mode or day time mode without worrying about the lack of light source. Reading through textbooks require certain amount of light that enable the reader to read comfortably while reading on tablets is automatically adjusted to the brightness level that we are in. In elementary school, teachers can customize the material of what they want the students to learn such as songs, children applications, and interesting illustrations. There are many authors who are now interested to make their content available exclusively on the eBooks content. Textbooks can be easily copy and paste around without caring of piracy which will hurt the authors a lot. However some stores that are exclusively provide only eBooks protected their content well and preventing them to use on any other place beside the certain account. Because of this, there are some contents that will be specializing for tablets only. Some of the universities in the United State started to implement the use of tablet for examination. Students, who are taking their exam, can get their result instantly without the need of professors. This can relieve a lot of the pressure from the professors who can be usually accused of being unfair in correcting students’ examination paper.

        However despite to numerous advantages that tablets can provide, there are also some disadvantages for them. Reading on tablets can lower your vision capacity mostly short sighted. Furthermore, using tablets is more expensive than textbooks. Study have shown that a tablet can cost as high as 550 percent of a textbooks which can be absurd high if the school want to replace thirty textbooks. The start-up cost to replace textbooks with tablets is very high which can be a difficulty for some schools. Aside from the high start-up cost, tablets are expensive to replace when they encounter any technical problem. If the school cannot ensure that the tablets cannot last long, it will be an ineffective method for the textbooks. Students in elementary school can be a big problem for any premium price tablets that are very fragile. There are also many distraction things on the tablets that sometimes take away the focus of the students. Of course, there are many more features in tablets than just being the book reader. There are games, email, and other social application. The most distraction for kid is games while social application such as Facebook on tablets is a huge distraction for teenager. On the other hand, the speed of reading on tablets is slower comparing to the people who are reading on printed books. Studies have found that people read about twenty percent faster than people who are reading on digital text. Tablets are also prone to be the victim of viruses such as malware and spyware. Those kinds of virus steal away the user information such as credit card and other personal info. Aside of internal hacking from others, tablets are also risk from the usage in the society. Tablets are likely to be stolen more than the textbooks because of its pricing. Additionally, students who are using tablets are likely to grow the behavior to cheat in the exam because of ease of access. As we have already known that textbooks cannot be skip through so the students who are using textbook have to read the whole content in other to find the point where they want. On the opposite, because of the skipping and searching, the students who read book on tablets will not fully understand the whole content that they are reading. This will lead them to have difficulties to answer any question more fluently beside the point where they have read. If we talk about the availability of the book on tablets, it will be difficult to find all the books that are available as printed on the tablets thus making it discouraging for some school to switch from textbook to tablets. What is more surprising is some students will develop some convenient reason such as I have forgotten my tablet at home or my tablets freeze. These kind of excuses will give them the reason not to submit any assignment on participate in the class activities due to their lack of material to study. Even though, tablets can help save a lot of printed material and save the need of the usage of paper, manufacture a tablet is also harming the environment. It still run on electricity which we get from the machine that run on fuel. Increasing the usage of tablets mean that we consume more energy thus making us burning the fossil fuel faster than before. According to the research of the science development for better energy source have shown that we use about three hundred percent more of the fossil fuel in 2013 comparing to the year of 2005. This is a huge jump and parts of it are on the handheld technology.  Finally because of the recent rising of technology, not all the students and professor can adapt very well to the technology thus they will need time to adapt and learn about those technologies. This will prove to be difficult and time consuming assuming that every new students and professors have to learn new thing.