Tablets are not used for just textbooks. It would be used for many applications, the internet, and many more. With the easy access to these things, kids can start playing with other entertainment applications and might stop paying attention to class. It is said that four-fifths of children aged between eight and eighteen multitask using handheld technology. 87% of America’s school teachers believe that "today’s digital technologies are creating an easily distracted generation with short attention spans." With this said, children in recent years are so used to multitasking that an easy access to an entertainment applications will increase the number of students that will likely stop paying full attention to classes(Should Tablets Replace Textbooks in K-12 Schools, Procon.org). Many people may already know, but tablets tends to crash, freeze, and get infected with viruses. Their battery would also die after a while and would not last a whole day without being charged. Crashes happen due to the lack of memory and this happens unexpectedly every now and then. The frequency will keep increasing as the tablets gets used more (Tips and Tricks: Crashes, Freezes, and General Belligerence, Wordpress). In consequence, the combinations of these malfunctions will cause class to stop and a whole lesson plan to be thrown out or delayed. This may seem obvious but the use …show more content…
However, the cost of replacing textbooks with tablets will be much more than you might think. First of all, purchasing a tablet for every student and staff in the school will be much more expensive than purchasing textbooks. At Jefferson City Public School, they purchased about 2,000 new ipads for $379 each. All together, the cost was $750,000. High School textbooks have an average cost of $70 each. This means that if Jefferson City School would have purchased a textbook instead, it would have costed them $140,000 (Hilgedick,Kris, Textbooks vs. tablets: Schools begin exploring transformation in learning tools, News Tribune). When a school uses a tablet, they would also need to purchase other things with the tablet. Some of the important things are the purchase of hardware and software. Generally, the Apple server software cost about $19.99(True Cost for Ipad Program,Think Write). Tablet cabinets, or sync carts, are also needed. This allows the tablets to be charged and sync in same piece of hardware. The tablet cabinets, will usually cost about $1,500 each in a full featured one. There are smaller cabinets at a lower cost, but you would need to buy more of those, that either way, the cost would not change (True Cost for Ipad Program,Think Write). Notably, there is a significant deviation between textbooks and tablets. The cost of replacing textbook with tablets does not lie only on purchasing. It would also cost a good