Constructing a Strong Argument

Constructing a Strong Argument

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Constructing a Strong Argument

Technology generally has been constantly changing, from the way people used to communicate to their ways of learning. Lately, the drift in education has had students being tutored online and to the extent of having notes in soft copy than printing out the text book or classroom notes. This has made students preferred the use of tablets as compared to computers or laptops.

Tablets have no limits when it comes to resources. This is because just one tablet can hold several textbooks of either the same unit or different units. This makes them have more preference compared to textbooks. As shared by (Burden & Byrd, 2015), the use of tablets have made the students and their learning ways evolve in a short period of time, which will eventually have led to a Long term productive learning through technology.

As much as the use of textbooks have been the best way in learning, printing out copies of it is no longer necessary. A text book and a soft copy are two different things, and as much as this statement is true, the use of a text book and a soft copy of a text book in a tablet is practically the same. Both the soft copy have the same content and knowledge, nothing in the soft copy has been altered or added that is different from the actual textbook.

According to (Fraser, 2015), the replacement of textbooks to soft copy books in tablets have more advantages in education. The soft copy books come with endless privileges and access to resources. Some of these resources are usually cannot be accessible when using the usual textbooks, because these textbooks cannot provide or come with extra oversights on certain topics. Some of these includes making the content in the textbook be easily read and the format used is very much in a structure that makes it very easy and interesting in reading.

Many teachers who have had experiences in using textbooks might be very much rigid to using tablets. As much as they might be very rigid, tablets has given teachers a relief when it comes to reducing their work load. Students can now access the course outline before being taught in class, they can access the notes and books that are in that course of study much before the lessons start. This gives room for the student to prep before the teacher and study before the lessons start.

When a teacher starts with the lessons, the course work will not likely be new to the student. Thus when the teacher is teaching in class, it becomes more of a discussion rather than an actual lesson. The teacher gets to teach and the student gets to contribute and ask more questions that he or she did not quite get either from the notes or from the lesson. This also give the student an upper hand to do more research on certain topics that are very wide and might need more attention, the attention the teacher cannot do while in class.

However, as much as the sales of textbooks in book stores have declined compared to online soft copy book sales over the years, the transition is still slow. According to a recent study, the textbooks that have been in use by the students over the years have not been well kept and most of them are in good state to be reused by other students. This has caused parents and schools to invest their money in books which have been wasted over the years due to student’s carelessness or ignorance. This has made it clear and essential for the need of tablets in the education system and sector as whole.

The students who have used textbooks have come out successfully despite their difficulty struggling to make their learning more enjoyable that it was and trying to put more time and money into buying more textbooks and printing out more and more of course work notes. With the use of tablets, learning has been automatically made interesting. The same textbooks have been manipulated slightly go include several features like pictorials, some applications have been set like the visual aid and audio books which have made learning very interesting. This will lead to the same goal as using textbooks which is having students learn and acquire knowledge.

According to (Bingham &Conner, 2015), the use of tablets in schools has many significances. Tablets have a very big memory, thus do not have a specific limit to the number of textbooks one can put in it. Tablets are also very portable unlike textbooks, one can also easily update data or assignments and increase their reading habits thus learning a lot. A teacher can decide to customize the content of their lessons making it interesting. Students also are able to study together remotely online through blogs or other education related sources.

Despite the advantages of having students use tablets, it has its disadvantages as well. Tablets sometimes can cause distractions to the students as they might be tempted to use the Internet or communicate with friends during a class. A tablet also pose a health risk especially with eyesight because of its light. The tablet can encounter technical issues like when the software crashes or when some applications are not compatibles or if it falls and the screen breaks and it no longer functions, or sometimes the battery might be very low during a lesson posing a threat to the teacher or student or sometimes it can be generally because they are costly to buy.

Generally, the benefits of using a tablet precedes the disadvantages since most of them can be dealt with by taking some precautions. Thus I strongly support the use of tablets instead of print out copies of the actual textbooks. It will save the time and money used. It will also compress a student’s workload to just very few soft copy books or notes in several folders for each course work.

Reference

T Bingham, M Conner, (2015), The new social learning

PR Burden, DM Byrd, (2015), Methods for effective teaching, Meeting the needs of all students

B Fraser, (2015), Classroom learning environments