Should tablets replace textbooks?

Tablets make classes more flexible and interesting

Question: Should tablets replace textbooks?
Position1 of 3›: Yes, tablets should replace textbooks.
Argument1 of 6›: Tablets make classes more flexible and interesting

Software designed for classroom use diversify the teaching and learning experience for teachers and students respectively.

The argument

Tablets have a larger diversity of uses than simply electronic textbooks. More and more software are now available for classroom use, and expands the possibilities for teaching and learning. First, tablets can accommodate learning with flexible capacity. For example, in the event that schools are unexpectedly closed, they can allow students to continue learning through telecommunications software and electronic textbooks at home. Traditional textbooks alone are insufficient for students to learn independently from in such cases. Second, tablets allow the diversification of teaching styles in the classroom. While traditional paper textbooks can only facilitate reading, highlighting and revision exercises, tablets can do all of that and more. For example, software such as Kahoot and Edmodo can facilitate interactive and collaborative learning in the classroom with ease. Quizzes and online discussions through these kinds of software can measure students’ level of knowledge without placing too much pressure on them.

Premises

[P1]Tablets add flexibility beyond electronic textbooks: if schools close unexpectedly, students can keep learning through telecommunications software and e-textbooks at home, which paper textbooks alone cannot support. [P2] Tablets also diversify teaching, doing everything paper does plus interactive, collaborative tools like Kahoot and Edmodo that measure understanding through low-pressure quizzes and discussions. [C] Therefore, because tablets make classes more flexible and interesting, tablets should replace textbooks.

Counter-arguments

Everything described here argues for providing tablets, not for removing books, and the position is a replacement claim. Remote continuity during closures, interactive quizzes and collaborative software all require devices to be available; none requires textbooks to be absent, and schools that use both get the benefits listed without incurring the costs of doing without print. Those costs are real. Comparisons of reading on screens with reading on paper generally find somewhat weaker comprehension for long or inference-heavy texts, along with poorer recall of where information sat in a document — differences that matter most for exactly the sustained reading textbooks are used for. Screens also introduce a documented attention cost in classrooms, since the device that runs the quiz also runs everything else. The flexibility argument assumes what the closures actually disproved. Learning from home through telecommunications software requires reliable broadband and a quiet place to work, and the 2020 experience demonstrated how unevenly those are distributed. Replacing books with tablets moves the equity problem from the device to the connection, and a pupil without home internet is worse off with a tablet than with a book. The economics also differ from the argument's implicit assumption. Textbooks are reused across cohorts for years; tablets need replacement cycles, repair, charging infrastructure, software licences and technical support, so the cost recurs rather than amortising.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] Remote continuity requires reliable home broadband and study space, which the 2020 closures showed to be unevenly distributed, so the flexibility claimed is conditional rather than general. [Rejecting P2] That tablets can do everything paper does and more is an argument for supplying them alongside books, not for removing books; comparisons of screen and print reading find weaker comprehension for long, inference-heavy texts.