Believe it or not, where I live, we’ve only had access to cell phones for two years. But in that time, many (most?) of the kids in our building over the age of about fourteen have adopted them. Whether they have complained to parents to get one, bought one themselves or had one given to them by their parents for safety reasons, as with many schools in North America, many of our kids carry a phone everywhere they go.
Students are welcomed and encouraged to bring their own laptop to my classroom. out of the 28 students I have this year, approximately 11 – 13 of them bring their own machines from home on any given day. Ipods (and yes, it’s ipods) are almost universal. Almost every student in my class has one; and honestly those that don’t; when I ask them about this say that they don’t want one as they don’t listen to a lot of music.
The one piece of technology I am wondering about is ereaders. Only five students in my class bring a kindle or a kobo with them on a daily basis. Anyone else seeing this? I’m wondering why this is? Is it because students get most of their books from a library instead of buying them? I’m curious about this as the technology of an ereader has become relatively cheap over the past year or two. Why aren’t students adopting this technology faster? Is this true in other places as well?
I’m hearing this a lot from the YA and MG authors I hang with these days. I think the answer is pretty simple.
Parents fear the one-click buy. They think that if they get their child one of these devices, the kids will be able to rack up big bills by clicking books. I tumbled on this when my wife and I talked about getting my kids their own readers. I didn’t have any problem with it but my wife said “No way I’m giving them a credit card enabled device.”
After I explained that they only really need a gift card to prime the pump, and that the same mechanism provides a ready-made answer to “what should I get the kids for birthday/Christmas/wev?” we never looked back.
Both my kids have K3s and they read on them a lot. By a lot I mean, they never get in the car without it, and yeah, we go through a lot of gift cards, but I’m happy shoving the odd $20 their way every other month or so and letting them discover new voices at ebook prices.
Disclaimer: both my kids are atypically heavy readers and have been even before ebooks came along.
This is an interesting perspective and I guess depends a lot on geography. I live in a very small town that is literally 6 hours from a bookstore. We are a family of readers. 4 people in the house = 4 ereaders. In the past, living in a place like this required us to make lists of books that we wanted and wait until we could make a run to a larger community and then buy a stockpile. Things changed when places like Amazon came along and we could place a mail order. Ereaders allow us to live like people do in larger places – we find things we like – and then we purchase them, getting them instantly. For us it is a complete benefit.
But I definitely understand what you mean and the concerns that parents have. It is important to know (as you state) that there are workarounds and ways to control purchasing. We simply don’t give the kids the password. They want to buy something and they come and see us. We still get the final say. (same with their itunes account by the way). I wonder what impact this will have long term on ereading habits? Interesting. Thanks for sharing.