Sunday, April 26, 2009

Go Green In Education, Green Textbooks are here.

Green Textbooks for all school systems

Have any of us ever thought of bringing the technologies which we use on a day to day basis and bringing it to the class room.

Think of opening your textbook on your laptop and coming to this very significant figure in all of biology or medicine his name is “Antonie van Leeuwenhoe”. How would you find out who he is, well Read:OutLoud and Bookshare have created such a platform. A couple of days ago I was reading Darwin’s Black Box and ran across Antonie van Leeuwenhoe and after highlighting the name then clicking on the dictionary icon in the upper right hand corner, then going to Wikipedia I found out he was a Dutch tradesman and scientist from Delft, the Netherlands and the first person to ever see a cell or a living organism. He was also the first to record microscopic observations of muscle fibers, bacteria, spermatozoa and blood flow in capillaries (small blood vessels).

Wow is this combination a way to learn. Let us just take it a bit further, now our professor is teaching about the United Nations and a new Nation has been added to its membership, well the textbook publisher has a link and the section on the United Nations is updated and now the student is up to date.

Why are we so behind on updating education to become a leader in the world for learning? Well it may be the same reason we are so behind in our healthcare system. Did you know Medicare does not know today what it spent last week on healthcare, while we at home know what was spent on our credit card up to the last hour in some cases.

We as a nation need to bring education to the 21st century. It is not because of one institution or another but now it is our obligation to our children to bring it up to date.

Money, what about laptops for all the students the monies are not in the system, they may be available. Well they should be and think of the savings and most of the educational vantages our children will have in understanding and contributing to our hurting nation. The new administration is talking about “green”, we would not have to have the textbooks printed and there is a savings which could be computed in to the request for purchase.

Green education, what a new idea, except it isn’t, it has been brought to the system by the Learning Disabled, through BookShare.org.

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