The man who leads New Trier High School’s technology department is 32 years old — old enough to remember his own high school experience without smart phones and Wi-Fi and Wikipedia.

But Chris Johnson is young enough to see the future of education, and it doesn’t include heavy, costly textbooks. He’s leading a pilot program to experiment with putting Apple iPads in the hands of a select number of students next year — not just in the classroom, but 24/7. At school, at home, at Starbucks — anywhere with a wireless internet connection.

If it succeeds, they’ll try it again the following year. Beyond that, who knows?

“We see a future, maybe five or seven years down the road, where every student has one of these,” Johnson recently told the New Trier school board about the sleek, touch screen device.

New Trier already has some courses that pair students with an iPad for use during their 40-minute class period.

“You get to the point where you’re at the end of the day and (the teacher) wants the kids to continue doing work and continuing assignments and it’s just not possible, because the iPads are locked in the classroom,” Johnson said.

Johnson and the school’s Technology Planning Committee are soliciting proposals from teachers with plans on how to implement the devices into their courses. The group is looking for teachers from a wide variety of departments, who teach students of mixed ability levels across the district’s four grades.

He won’t say how much the district is planning to spend on the pilot program, only that it will be contained within the current technology budget and funded by money originally intended for replacing aging desktop and laptop computers. The number of students who get iPads next fall will depend on how many teachers submit successful proposals, he said.

“If you had 20 teachers with two sections each, that would be 1,000 (students). That is not unrealistic to think that could happen within our budget. And that’s only 20 teachers,” said New Trier Superintendent Linda Yonke.

Yonke, sitting in front of her own iPad, said the district has been talking about electronic textbooks for years, but it’s never been cost-effective.

“It’s not necessarily cheaper,” she said, noting that e-books’ prices have historically been “almost as high as a paper book, and you can’t even keep it,” meaning the file automatically removes itself from the device after a set period of time.

“The problem is we need Google or the Amazons of the world to come into textbooks and they’re not,” said School Board president John Myefski. “It’s 100 percent about profit.”

Two days after their conversation, Apple announced its latest headline-grabbing foray: A dive into the textbook industry. The announcement even included an answer for two of Yonke’s concerns.

Textbooks with Apple’s new iBooks 2 app would not expire from a user’s iPad. And they would cost $14.99. That’s a fraction of the cost of most textbooks, Johnson said, noting that a New Trier biology book costs $80 in the school’s bookstore.

It would also provide tools for teachers to develop their own electronic textbooks, which could include links to internet sites or explanatory videos embedded within the copy, as well as quizzes, games and puzzles that require the reader to interact with the subject.

Regardless, a 1-to-1 program that would put an iPad in the hands of every New Trier student is “a long way off,” Johnson said. “I think we’re looking at it just as a short-term program. We’re doing it because we think it will be successful; we hope it will be successful.

Part of the reason why he emphasizes patience is for teacher buy-in.

One who has already bought-in is Wes Molyneaux, a New Trier anatomy teacher and technology staff developer. He works with other faculty members to integrate technology into the classroom. But he stressed that before the school can make a bulky backpack obsolete by issuing students iPads, the paperless concept needs to be welcomed by everyone.

“If we get to that tipping point, where we say wow, the majority of teachers and the majority of students are really doing this, then we’re maybe ready to push into that realm,” Molyneaux said. “Because otherwise you’re forcing them to teach in a way that they’re not comfortable with. Why make a really good teacher change what they’re doing if they’re really good?”

But Molyneaux, 30, is already comfortable using the iPad in his classroom. He pointed to a hominid evolution project that itself has already evolved, thanks to the iPad.

In the past, students were assigned a species and used digital cameras to photograph their research subjects. Then they’d load them onto the computer, print them out and turn them in — along with other information — as part of a lab, Molyneaux said.

“The learning was sort of lost in the technology of taking pictures and loading them in and marking them up with styluses on tablets and all these different kinds of things,” he said. “And with the iPads this year we were really able to scale this project back and really focus it in.”

Students used the camera inside the iPad to take photos, then used an app to include text and create slides which were then loaded into a movie app, where they recorded their own voices as narrators using iPad’s microphone.

The end product was a “very professional looking documentaries on the species they were assigned,” Molyneaux said. “The production of these wonderful documentaries was really not possible before.”

“It was more about the content than it was about ‘How do I click on this?’ or ‘How do I import this?’” he said. “That’s one of the reasons I think the iPad is a great choice for education and for students. It’s just a simple machine that when the kids pick it up and they learn one or two quick things, everything works so seamlessly together.”

There are scores of possibilities for putting iPads in use in the classroom.

“It’s been a constant flow of ‘A-ha’ moments,” Molyneaux said.

Every subject could benefit from an iPad, Johnson said, not just math, science and English. Social studies students could get a better grasp on the Civil War by searching interactive battlefield maps, he said.

Students can use the devices to record themselves speaking in a foreign language, then either share with a classmate or verify grammar and pronunciation.

Even kinetic wellness students — the school’s physical education program — could use an iPad to control their daily workout or personal health statistics, Johnson said.

Just the concept of iPads in the hands of students got the imaginations of school board members going at their Jan. 17 meeting. Though the pilot program won’t start until the fall, they began discussing the possibilities of iPad insurance — either $50 per year through the school or hiring a third-party to operate a program — as well as whether the district could charge parents a fee for the device.

“I would love to see the kinds and the parents pay something so they know they’re invested in it,” Myefski said, especially since the iPads would be going home at night.

“They need to take personal ownership in order to be creative or innovative with a device like this. It doesn’t pass around very well.”

Teacher iPad proposals will be reviewed this month by the New Trier Technology Planning Committee and accepted pitches will be announced the following month, according to the school’s project schedule. In May, the school board is scheduled to approve the project as part of the 2013 capital expenditure program.