Clearwater High School next year will replace traditional textbooks with eReader devices, reports the St. Petersburg Times. The gadgets will be fully loaded with all the textbooks students need, minus all the paper. For rising junior Bennie Niles, 17, it could mean accessing English, math, and physics texts via a handheld device more on par with the technology he and his peers use every day. Though the school hasn’t settled on a vendor, school officials are negotiating with Amazon to equip all 2,100 students with the 10-ounce Kindle devices this fall. Already, the school has issued eReaders to all 100 of its teachers. Clearwater could be the first public high school attempting such a sweeping shift with the Kindle. Schools elsewhere have used eReaders, but mostly on a per-class basis. A Massachusetts boarding school recently made waves by completely digitizing its library. Principal Keith Mastorides said he was inspired to make the switch earlier this school year after campus surveys revealed a desire to integrate more technology with classroom instruction. “When you think about students today, three-quarters of their day is spent on some kind of electronic device,” Mastorides said. “We’re just looking at textbooks a little differently.”
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