E-textbooks enter Indian classrooms

This generation has learnt to convey their thoughts in just 140 characters and are used to the culture of smartphones, tablets and e-textbooks. But there are some bottlenecks that have to be looked upon before letting way for the educational revolution in the country.

Apple, the technological giant has launched an app recently for the digital textbooks that was a huge success recording 350,000 downloads in three days. The experts believe that these digital textbooks are the main key to the education in future.

The E-textbooks will no doubt be the key to the education as the generation at present is tech-savvy. It is already an era of computers. If children stop carrying heavy bags to schools, the trees will also be saved. But the main concern is about the availability of the resources.

The shortcomings at present are taking long time and to obtain the benefits of the e-textbooks, the schools must ensure that all the kids have the access to internet and computer that will take lot of structural reformation.

The technology has obviously created enormous enthusiasm as its is available easily and it has many other useful features. A parent has claimed that her daughter, eight years old spends lot of time with the computer and it is quite difficult to make her read her books. But she is even toointerested to read online.

An e-textbook is definitely a boon to the students as it can motivate the children to study. These are the basis to form e-classrooms. These have more advantages than the traditional ones as they include animations and illustrations that are not possible with the ordinary books.

These type of books have the capability to hold the entire syllabus in them and they also provide the opportunity to learn in multiple ways like audio, video and text. These also have evaluation features like assessments and tests to give an indication of the student's performance instantly.

Currently, these books lack the interactive elements but in future they will have many of them with the inclusion of images, tables and references. They will also have videos, audios, tests and other knowledge sources like wikipedia and dictionaries. Similar to purchasing the hard copy of a book from a store, the parents can do it online.