A school without books - any downsides of switching to digital-only?

Below are are several related videos from the WSJ YouTube channel. My suggestion is to watch them all before forming an opinion.

Tablet Guides Med Students in Gross Anatomy Lab -- A digital dissection manual, published by a professor and students at Columbia's medical college, aims to improve the gross anatomy student experience:



A High School Without Textbooks -- Archbishop Stepinac High School, in White Plains, N.Y., is one of the first schools in the U.S. to do away with paper textbooks. Instead, the all-boys prep school requires students to use tablets and laptops in class:



Children in some Chicago suburbs who go to standard, public-funded schools are required to have either an iPad or Google Chromebook. These devices replace some, or all, of their textbooks. According to many parents, the results so far are mixed.

Can Games Help Improve Education? A growing number of education experts, school districts and companies are applying what young people love about games and gaming to new tools for teaching core subjects. But do they work? The current generation of educational games leaves a lot of room for improvement:



5 Tips for Parents of Tablet-Addicted Kids -- How young is too young to be using an iPad or other touch-screen media device? What should parents do if they can't get their children off the tablet?



The short answer: "Children learn best when they interact with people, not screens."

Top 5 Tech Tips from a Teacher -- Here are the Top 5 Tech Tips from the all-digital "Ohio teacher of the year" who records videos at night and texts her students. However, studies have shown that is it not possible for "all students to be engaged 100% of the time". Human brain needs a break after about 20 minutes of intensive education:



The videos above bring the logical question: If most of the learning will be done via apps, videos and games, do children need to go to the actual school building? To faciliate normal psychological development, they can comminicate with their peers at other venues such as basketball games, karate classes, group practices, etc.

Related:

Six Advantages of Online Learning - WSJ YouTube http://bit.ly/1cJrAK0

Twitter addiction: Could you get by without Twitter?

From BBC:

A popstar gave up on social networking after a dinner party at which she realised she spent more time updating Twitter than interacting with her companions.

Online communities like Twitter, where people follow each other without being acquainted in real life, can be brutal: "If you're going to broadcast as a tweeter then you need to be thick skinned," says Dr Yeung, "If you're the kind of person who takes things personally, opening yourself up to criticism from strangers is not a good idea."

A Twitter user: "I could not fully concentrate on anything for longer than 20 minutes," says Carolyn. I simply had to check and update the feed. What if someone had asked a question of me? What if there was an interesting piece of information related to our experiment that I could read? It was highly distracting and I felt genuinely anxious."

"Everybody craves information," says applied psychologist Dr Lucy Atcheson, "It's what makes the world interesting. But you have to ask whether you need it all. Twitter has an element of making people feel important."

"You can get addicted to thinking that somebody is interested in your every move. You have this idea that there is a virtual audience. But when are you tweeting information, and when is it just vanity?"

References:
Could you get by without Twitter? BBC.