by Breanna Lai, for KUAM News

Guam - As summer comes to a close and a new school year kicks off, one local school has found a way to incorporate technology into everyday teaching and learning. St. Paul Christian Academy has traded in traditional textbooks for e-books.

Jeff Sanchez is St. Paul's multimedia instructor, and told KUAM News, "Basically, if you think of a textbook, or two or three text books, an e-book is the same thing, but its online so its accessible and its interactive. There are some many more things that you can do with an e-book that you couldn't do with a traditional textbook, not to mention it doesn't weigh half as much."

Not only will e-books save students a trip to the chiropractor, but they also are helping the environment, as students can submit their homework online, reducing the amount of paper used in schools.

"We realized that to implement e-books every student would pretty much have to have their own laptop or netbook, so St. Paul is helping our students. We have brought in over 300 netbooks and we have offered a deferred payment program so they can purchase a netbook from us over a year's time, pretty much monthly installments," he beamed.

Sanchez says one of the best features of e-books is that if a student misses part of a lesson or has questions they can watch tutorials on e-books. Another techie feature about this campus is that half of the classrooms are equipped with smartboards. Smart boards are the new-age dry erase board, with touch screen capabilities and a wireless tracking pad, allowing teachers mobility while teaching.

Sanchez said smart boards significantly increase the level of interest students have in the lesson being taught. "We have smartboards at the school, projectors, but now they have a tool that they can use throughout the campus, they can use at home, were teaching them that there is more to computing than social networking and things like that, that you can actually study," he explained. "It's not even the wave of the future, its what to do now, its e-books."