Schools Dump Textbooks for iPods, Laptops

Sept. 13, 2009— -- For generations, school meant books -- lots of books. But not anymore. Around the country, from high school to grad school, textbooks are getting harder to find. Technology has made the library something that can fit into the palm of your hand.

Cushing Academy, a private school outside Boston, is dismantling its library altogether, giving away 20,000. Headmaster James Tracy said the decision was simple.

"We decided that we can best use our resources if we decided to go with e-books and e-resources," he said.

Empire High School, a public school in Tucson, Ariz., is another textbook-free zone. Students there are given laptops on the first day of school instead of a pile of heavy books.

But Monticello High School in Virginia has launched an even lighter experiment in digital learning. A handful of classes are trying out the iPod Touch as a primary learning tool.

English teacher Mae Craddock said she structures many of her lessons around the new technology, instructing students to research, read and write on their handheld devices. It is something that she says came naturally to them.

"They took right away to it," she told ABC News. "There was no adaptation necessary."

Laptops and iPods cost money, of course, but so do textbooks; some can run a couple hundred dollars each. And because there is so much free educational material online, high-tech can sometimes mean low-cost.

There is another strike against traditional textbooks: They go out of date, sometimes within a year or so, and replacing them can cost a school district hundreds of thousands of dollars. But with new technology like e-books or handheld devices, updates can happen instantaneously.

Students at Monticello High School leap at the chance to use the Ipod touches for schoolwork. They say it's quick, far more convenient than big textbooks -- and there is that "cool" factor.