2005年NPR美国国家公共电台八月-Students' Prayers Answered: No Books

In Vail Arizona, outside Tucson, a new school with a new idea: no textbooks, instead, every student at Empire High School, all 330 of them, has a loaner laptop for the year. While other students might read in books, Empire students will read on their laptops. Jeremy Gypton teaches history at Empire High, and was involved in planning the curriculum for the school with the first semester began in late July. Mr. Gypton, tell us about the assignment that you've already given that might otherwise have involved a textbook, but in this case involves a computer.

Well, with the, with history I try to use as many primary source documents as possible. I actually just recently had my students, studying my American History student, studying the French-Indian War and its impact. And so I actually had the reading parts of the Proclamation of 1763. This is a very key document from that time period. And that sort of document is just not available in a traditional textbook, I would have to say :"Go online or go to a library and find a copy", whereas with the laptops and with the resources they're using, they have immediate 1 access to it.

What's the point here? Is it to get to primary sources or is it to use a medium that youngsters today are more familiar with? How do you, how do you describe what you are doing?

When it comes to our, I guess, our reasoning: these are the students who've grown up with the computer, with the Internet, as kind of organic to their environment. It's not an add-on, like it, like it was to me. And this is normal for them. And so limiting them by like sort of a traditional, maybe thousand-page textbook is, from their perspective, I think a little bit abnormal, because they are used to being able to reach out, and view one topic from 20 different angles as opposed to just the one angle that a textbook would present.

Is there, though, enough material, either on disc or online, to supplant 2 the entire high school educations with the textbooks? Can you find in an orderly way some presentation of exactly what happened during the French-Indian War, say?

And that, that, that's a great question. Because a lot of people when they hear what we're doing here, they think that we're using just search engines like Google or Yahoo, or something like that, and that's absolutely not the case. In my current territory the social studies we actually have a subscription 3 web service called ABC CLIO. And they have digitized all their resource material into a very very easy-to-use extraordinarily 4 comprehensive series of websites. I have one website, one portal for ancient war history, one for modern which is just 1500 to present, and one for just American. So depending on what class the students are taking or where in history we are, they would log in to that portal and it has a very very powerful search function that allows me to direct them to specific documents or essays on specific topics, pictures, maps, audio, video, you name it.

You're sort of assuming here that high school freshmen 5 all know how to work a laptop, do they?

You know, they don't. The idea that "wow these kids", you know, they love the Internet, they live on the Internet, they use chat rooms, they use you know iPods and all the stuff, that means transferable skills. And xbox does not mean Microsoft Word. I ought to be completely honest that my, er, my students were coming in less skilled in what I would call useful computer skills than I had expected them to be. However, I mean their learning curve has been steep, but they've been, I mean they've been good.

Jeremy Gypton, history teacher at Empire High school in Vail Arizona, where the students don't use textbooks, just laptops. Thank you very much for talking with us.

Thank so much for your time .