Students today are much more accustomed to finding information electronically than manually in textbooks. Being able to use a search engine to find information on a topic is much faster, and more accurate than reading/skimming pages in a book to find what you need. Laptops also provide the option to conveniently, and much more cost effectively update educational material and curriculum. With paper textbooks, schools are required to buy entirely new books whenever they are updated, or risk letting students fall behind with outdated information. Online textbook publishers, on the other hand, provide access to new revisions as soon as they are released. Schools simply download the updates and get the new information without having to buy new sets of books.
Notebook computers also make students’ lives easier outside of the classroom by improving organization and back health. They allow you to do homework without taking every single piece of paper out of your backpack and sorting through them. When all the materials are stored on the computer, it’s that much harder to forget one textbook or notebook at school. In addition, laptops don’t weigh nearly as much as an entire backpack full of textbooks. Lighter backpacks result in fewer back problems for teens who need to -take home materials for multiple subjects each night. .
Making permanent marks in textbooks is not acceptable in most schools. When teachers hand new books out to students, students are told to take good care of them so they last longer, which includes not writing in them or tearing pages out. Today’s notebooks have features that allow a student to highlight important information and to make notes on the page of interest.