Some schools are attempting to get laptops assigned to every student to help students prepare for a world where computer literacy is becoming an increasingly important ingredient for success. With netbooks costing as low as $250, it seems like a no brainer to equip every child with a portable PC. But then there is the question of whether computer literacy is more important than book literacy. Reading is still an essential part of learning and a lot can be learned from reading books. If you think reading is more important, then you might advocate that every student get assigned a kindle e-book reader.

Here’s a quote from a Scholastic article

Kindles stocked with well-chosen e-books would also allow teachers to flex new teaching strategies, according to Cornelia Brunner, the deputy director at the Center for Children and Technology in New York City. “You could have a very nicely selected group of readings. . . . Kids could read, annotate, and actually clip and be asked to make connections among those clippings,” says Brunner.

Other possible benefits include providing students with more books electronically than is practical in print, reducing photocopying, relieving the unhealthy weight of student backpacks, and—though this case is far from proven—saving school districts money on textbooks.

An education think-tank led be former Clinton advisor Thomas Z. Freedman, even proposed giving a Kindle to every student in the country in a paper titled A Kindle in Every Backpack. According to the paper:

We shouldn’t wait a decade or two to begin to achieve what is inevitable — an education system where each American schoolchild has an eTextbook, like Amazon’s Kindle, loaded with the most up-to-date and interactive teaching materials and texts available,” the paper argues. “The ‘Kindle in every backpack’ concept isn’t just an educational gimmick—it could improve education quality and save money.

One solution may be to use an ebook reader application on the laptops so students can have the best of both technologies.

Do you think it would be more effective for students to have laptops or ebook readers?

Photo by Yutaka Tsutano