The Echo

Kindles at High School Bring Praise, Surprises
http://www.edweek.org/dd/articles/2010/10/19/04mct_flkindle.html
By Stephen Thompson, Tampa Tribune (MCT)
Clearwater, Fla.


Social studies teacher Kathy Biddle was giving a lecture recently when she noticed a handful of students fiddling with their Kindles, the hand-held devices Clearwater High School made available to all its students at the beginning of the year.


Biddle stopped her lesson. She scolded her charges, telling them to focus on what she was saying. She thought they were texting their friends or looking at Facebook. They weren't. The students were taking notes on Biddle's lecture, using a feature on the electronic book-reader called 'My Clippings.' They then instructed the rest of the class how to do it.


It was an illuminating moment, one of many in the month since Clearwater High became one of the first schools in the nation to give every student a Kindle. The experiment is being closely watched by school districts across the country.


Until then, teachers and administrators at Clearwater High envisioned the students using the Kindle just to access downloaded textbooks, or for research. With its Internet access, students can plug in a term on Google, as Biddle's World History students did last week, and read the results.


No one thought the students' fingers were nimble enough to take notes on the Kindle's tiny keyboard.


Since the Kindles were distributed, just over a month ago, to some 2,100 students at Clearwater High, there have been some nice surprises and some glitches, mostly minor, school administrators say. Some kinks still need to be worked out, they add, but by and large the devices have been a success.

The students say the same thing.


Sophomore Josh Jones, 16, said he's been using his Kindle almost every day. "It's like having a mini-computer in your hand," he said.


It took two days to distribute the devices in mid-September, and on the second day, so much text was being downloaded onto them that the school district got a call from AT&T, the company whose wireless service Amazon now uses for its Kindle.

"We crashed the system," Clearwater High Principal Keith Mastorides says with a sheepish grin.

For now, the English and math textbooks are on the Kindles, along with the The Tampa Tribune, the St. Petersburg Times and a handful of novels, Mastorides says. Other subjects, like social studies and science, will be available in the years ahead.

Up to 100 parents at first balked at having their children assigned a Kindle, said John Just, assistant superintendent for management information systems for the school district. Perhaps they didn't want to take responsibility for the $177.60 device, or they didn't think their child was responsible enough, he said.

In any event, some of them appear to be coming around, Just said. Mastorides and his staff are distributing two to three Kindles a day to students whose parents initially didn't want them having one.

Anyone agreeing to take the Kindles had two options: accept one without insurance and risk paying $177.60 for a lost, stolen or damaged device, or pay $20 for an insurance policy with a $25 deductible, the principal said.

Sixty percent of the students took out the insurance policy, Mastorides said, and since then 20 claims have been filed, he said.

Taking care of the devices has been a concern.

A student might shove his Kindle into his backpack up against another electronic device, such as a cell phone, and the Kindle screen becomes demagnetized, with lines or dark spots, Just said.

The Kindles are still under warranty, and the district is working with Amazon to address the problem, Just said. Still, students appear to need some instruction when it comes to taking care of their Kindles, though, even now, it's obvious they like them much more than they do their textbooks.

Some students are making their own Kindle cases, Just said. One Best Buy sold out all of its cases after the students started getting the devices, he said.

Another problem is that roughly 10 students tried to customize their Kindles to their own needs by de-authorizing the Pinellas schools account embedded on the device so they could download their own books or use their credit cards to buy books. Amazon is immediately alerted to the changeover, and the students have been spoken to, Just said.

As for using the devices to access inappropriate web sites, the devices are formatted so students cannot access pornography even if they wanted to. "Playboy.com doesn't even come up," Just said.

One morning last week, almost all of Mrs. Biddle's students in her honors World History class had their Kindles out in class as part of a project, using Google to research the differences and similarities between Athens and Sparta.

Jenna Troiso finds herself using her Kindle to find translations for Spanish words, and Tyler Bush says he gets his work done faster with the Kindle. It gives one access to more information that is contained in a book, and it's easier to get the information from a Kindle than it is from a book, the 15-year-old said.

"You don't have to flip pages," he said. "It's just there."

Jazmyn Rivera points out you can't get paper cuts with a Kindle. She said it was easier to get used to the Kindle than she had expected.

Before, students wanting to access the Internet at Clearwater High would have to wait in line at the school library for a desktop. Not now, said Chris Houghton, 16. "It's nice being able to go on the Internet in class," he said.

There are some slightly irritating aspects to the Kindle, the students say.

A user has to completely download one page before switching to another. Otherwise the page freezes. It's also harder to highlight a passage for future reference. And the Kindles don't work particularly well if they are not kept properly charged, the students say.

But these are minor quibbles.

"Just bring it out of your bag and do anything you want to do on it," said Samantha Foster, 15. "It's kind of nice."

Teachers have noticed another nice aspect: By the end of the class, after using their Kindles, the students have jotted down four times as much information regarding Athens and Sparta as their predecessors did last year using textbooks, Biddle said.