SANTA CRUZ, Calif. _ At Monte Vista Christian School, his­tory text­books could soon be a relic of the past. Ditto for tomes on biol­ogy and English lit­er­a­ture. And spiral-bound note­books and pens _ who needs them?

They’re so old school when you have a 16GB iPad, and Monte Vista has 60 of the lat­est must-have tech­nol­ogy from Apple for use in class­rooms. The iPads were intro­duced Thursday to advanced place­ment stu­dents who will par­tic­i­pate in a pilot project. If all goes well, Headmaster Stephen Sharp antic­i­pates replac­ing heavy and expen­sive text­books with cheaper, inter­ac­tive e-versions.

Sharp believes the school is among the first to adopt iPads, but it won’t be the last.

“There are many aca­d­e­mic advan­tages,” he said. “They pro­vide new access to pho­tos, videos, daily news­pa­pers and resource mate­r­ial that enhance the curriculum.”

English teacher Marcus Schwager showed his stu­dents how with a click they could look up unfa­mil­iar words in Shakespeare’s “The Tempest,” dis­cov­er­ing the mean­ing as well as the pronunciation.

Science teacher Cynthia Armstrong led her stu­dents through an inter­ac­tive dis­play of a cut­away view of the female body, demon­strat­ing the zoom func­tion for closer looks.

“It has lots of bells and whis­tles you don’t have in a print text­book,” she said.

“I’m really new to it but I’m super-excited to use the iPad,” his­tory teacher Greg Davis told his sopho­more advanced place­ment students.

Do his stu­dents want to copy a graph he draws on the board? There’s an app for that. How about check­ing com­pre­hen­sion with a pop quiz? Students find out imme­di­ately whether they answered cor­rectly, and an expla­na­tion is just a click away.

If he’s lec­tur­ing, they can type their notes using the flat-screen key­board, and if he’s talk­ing too fast and a stu­dent misses some­thing, well, there’s an app for that too.

SoundPaper gives stu­dents the abil­ity to record the lec­ture for lis­ten­ing later at home. Sitting at tables, iPads propped before them in black cloth cases, stu­dents tapped icons to bring up pages.

“It’s a lit­tle eas­ier to use,” said sopho­more Alyssa Villanueva, 15, com­par­ing the iPad to a text­book. “You can really focus on where you’re studying.”

For now, stu­dents will have to e-mail their notes to an account they can access at home since the iPads are for class­room use only. Students also will use their accounts to access e-textbooks at home. The tablets retail for $499 each, but Apple pro­vided a $50 school dis­count, he said. Electronic text­books, which are increas­ingly avail­able, cost about a third of print versions.

Apple also has a pro­gram to train teach­ers to use the tech­nol­ogy, Sharp said.

“The kids are going to be able to edu­cate us too,” he said.

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