In Montgomery Township, they may be getting one out of three.

The township schools are in the midst of a six-week pilot computer program that could, in the long run, spell the end of traditional textbooks.

BeyondBooks.com, an Internet site offering online texts for students, has been finding its way into district sixth- and eighth-grade social studies classes since December.

The site offers an interactive curriculum that may prove both economical and practical while taking advantage of the latest that technology has to offer.

"I think it's inevitable that we are going to have electronic textbooks," said Montgomery schools Director of Humanities Tom Barclay. "It's a very useful, flexible resource that is just a few years away from when it's going to be absolutely useful."

Barclay noted the wide gap in cost between traditional paper textbooks and the new, online variety.

"If you took an average cost of a textbook, it's going to be about $50 per book, assuming that you'd need one for math, social studies, science, language arts and reading and writing," he said.

"With five textbooks, on average you'd be spending about $250 per child on texts.

"In the middle school, if you had 1,100 kids times $250 over five years, there's a lot of cash there - a quarter of a million dollars," he said.

"In contrast, the price for the entire program in the middle school would be $7.50 per child per year," he said.

Barclay added that the social studies book currently being considered by the district would cost only $2 per child per year.

According to Barclay, not only are paper textbooks a bit too cumbersome, they also pose problems for teachers looking for the most current information on a subject.

"As an educator, you want to see five years of usage from a book," Barclay said. "With knowledge changing the way it is, a significant amount of information will become dated quickly. For social studies, you want to have the most up to date information because things change frequently."

Barclay noted that most texts become outdated in less than two years and cost somewhere between $60 and $80.

Beyond Books updates and changes the information found in its pages on a regular basis, said Barclay.

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Along with teacher-support materials and self-assessments, the site purports to meet national and state standards.

"The material is lively," he said. "It's interactive and I think it's more than a textbook might be for children to explore."

About 200 sixth-graders in ancient history classes just completed their portion of the pilot while 100 to 300 eighth-graders are getting their crack at Beyond Books as they complete a unit on American government, said Barclay.

Students have had no problem adapting to the new technology, he said.

"They are very adept at using the Internet," Barclay said. "They're accustomed to it. Our students, beginning in the middle school, learn how to use online databases, which are similar to this program. The children didn't see the difference. They'd kind of had the training already."

As with paper textbooks, a student would sit down to read chapters corresponding with that day's classroom material, said Barclay.

But Beyond Books - accessible anytime and day from anywhere there is an Internet connection - will enable teachers to more readily communicate assignments and feedback to students.

"An instructor has an electronic desk that has file cabinets," Barclay said. "Each portal has a class and inside each one of those folders are the names of all the children in the class. Once they create an assignment the program will, through e-mail, send it to the entire class simultaneously.

"The student would then get and open the e-mail," he said. "They can then manipulate the information, answer the questions and mail it back to the teacher's desk. They can communicate back and forth with each other."

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The electronic text also gives students more of an opportunity to learn something about a topic that particularly strikes them while doing their readings.

"There are hot links for greater depth," Barclay said. "Students can go back to a part of the text that they've read that in some way interests them and learn more."

Through the site, teachers also will be able to find out the last time a student visited and attempted to do the reading or assignment, said Barclay.

One of the initial kinks Barclay got out of the system was "noise."

"You don't want to have a lot of margin information," he said. "A lot of Web pages are just so busy that it's distracting to adults and children. One of my objectives was to get an electronic text page that had white space on both sides of the margins."

Overall though, Barclay isn't complaining much.

"There are certain aspects of it that can be a bit better," he said. "Things like course overviews, outlines, teacher resource kits that can be found only online need to be made available in print. Give it a couple more years and it'll be perfected."

In the long-term, the online text system would be used by students both in the classroom and at home. For now, during the pilot study, any student that does not have a computer at home will have access through the school's media center. In a worst case scenario, the readings can be printed out.

At the end of the trial period, the district will assess the site and determine whether to include it in next year's curriculum, said Barclay.

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Regardless of whether the district adopts the new technology, it appears it is among the first in the area to use electronic and online textbooks.

Officials from the Hamilton, Hopewell Valley Regional, Lawrence and West Windsor-Plainsboro school districts said they had not yet looked into the possibility of using the technology for daily classroom instruction.

"We are a ways away from doing it," said English department supervisor Pat Coats at Hopewell Valley Central High School. "It's probably not going to happen in the foreseeable future. It's not even under discussion."

Barclay hastened to add that the use of online textbooks in Montgomery is not yet a done deal.

"What we're piloting is the use of it," he said. "We want to make sure everyone is comfortable using it and that it's reliable. We're also going to be checking its accuracy and find out if there are multicultural relevant things that you would find in textbooks.

"We're not going to hurry into it," he said. "We want to make sure it is stable and reliable and that parents, students and teachers are comfortable using it. It really is quite different from the paper text."