In today’s world, tablets are becoming more and more popular especially in the classroom.  Personally, I feel that tablets are a waste of money. If students were given a tablet for school, they will never pay attention in class. Granted some kids already don’t pay attention in class, but by providing students with tablets, the school is just feeding their laziness.  I would rather carry around a heavy textbook than carry around a breakable tablet.

Tablets can cause damage to your eyes.  According to procon.org, students who look at a screen all day can develop computer vision syndrome.  This syndrome can cause dry eyes, blurred vision, eyestrains, and headaches.  Textbooks do not cause this problem.  Your eyes are very important to your body, why risk damaging them by looking at a screen all day?

Textbooks are strong and hard to break.  It is much easier to break a tablet than it is to break a textbook.  Also, tablets can shut down if they are not charged long enough and could cause a student to miss out on a lesson due to the lack of taking care of his or her tablet. Textbooks do not shut down like tablets.  They can last almost a life time and will never die out on you. It’s much cheaper to replace a textbook than a tablet.

Another reason why textbooks are better than tablets is that tablets allow kids short cuts.  When kids are doing work in class they can easily not do the work and look up all the answers online.  If they are assigned an article to read for classwork, with a tablet, they can easily find a summary of the article online and just search the internet for the answers.  This takes away from the students’ in-class learning process.

I feel that textbooks are much better than tablets because textbooks are irreplaceable. The technology at the heart of the tablet is constantly changing. Textbooks, however, do not change. Textbooks are stronger than tablets, cheaper, cause less physical damage to a person, and they do not cause any distractions to the students.  Why don’t you try to see which one is better by keeping a textbook and a tablet in the same back pack and see which one lasts at the end of the year.