As I mentioned in a previous post, a majority of the items in the Forney ISD bond election passed, including the expansion of the electronic textbook initiative. The school board has been discussing this project and has laid out a time line to roll the electronic texbooks out to all students in grades 5-12; the plan is to have the roll-out complete by the 2008-2009 school year.

Also, the one thing that remains undecided after the previous bond election is the fate of the much-needed 2nd high school or expansion of the current high school; the school board appears to be studying this issue to try to determine, yet again, what the voters want (I can’t blame them, the voters have been sending mixed signals, at best) – as part of this, Forney ISD has posted a survey concerning the 2nd high school issue and the potential for a future bond election, which I highly encourage all residents of Forney ISD to participate in.

From what I understand, the district plans to get laptops and electronic textbooks into the hands of the teachers next spring, in March 2007. Then middle school students will be issued the laptops in spring of 2007, with the high school and the new elementary schools coming online in the program during the 2008-2009 school year, with the existing elementary schools coming into the program soon after that. There’s some talk of a wireless network at each campus to aid in the distribution and updating of the books, which would be amazing – not only would Forney ISD be the first school district in the state, if not the country, to roll out electronic textbooks district-wide for grades 5-12, but Forney may also begin to build wireless networks in each school, something more and more districts seem to be doing these days.

The first benefit that comes to mind, thanks to horrible memories of lugging a way-too-heavy backpack around during high school, is that kids will no longer have to lug around backpacks full of textbooks, which seem to weigh more and more each year. In addition, textbooks can be updated much more often, and the district won’t have to invest substantial money into replacing worn-out, lost, damaged or destroyed textbooks. From what I’ve heard FISD district officials say, there’s been what I would consider surprisingly little loss or damage to the laptops issued to students in the pilot program they’ve conducted.

Speaking of the pilot program, if you get a chance, talk to someone who teaches one of the classes that were in the pilot program, or talk to the parent of a child that was in the pilot – it’s amazing to hear what sort of things the students are learning how to do; there’s elementary school students learning how to produce presentations in PowerPoint, and other things that even my generation (I’m somewhere between Generation X and Generation Y, or whatever they’re calling the Generation after Gen X now) didn’t learn until high school or college, if even then. This program is revolutionary, and to me is a great symbol of how forward-thinking the Forney Independent School District is. The e-textbook program has been widely discussed on the Internet, and has been in the news around the state and even in some out-of-state media outlets, letting people all across the US know how cutting-edge Forney ISD is.