The march from textbooks to computerized content began to look a little more inevitable this week as educators in Arizona and Tennessee edged closer to the all-digital curriculum.

In Tennessee, a private partnership formed by educators, a web designer, a lawmaker, and a history buff launched a web site to help schools fill the gap in state history instruction left a few years ago when Nashville ended mandatory state history courses for middle schools.

Out West, the transition was moving even more swiftly. The Vail, Ariz., School District announced its Vail High School in Tucson will become the state's first all-wireless, all-laptop public school this fall. The 350 students at the school will not have traditional textbooks. Instead, they will use electronic and online articles as part of more traditional teacher lesson plans.

Vail School District's decision to go with an all-electronic school is rare. Often, cost, insecurity, ignorance, and institutional constraints prevent schools from making the leap away from paper, some software experts say.

"The efforts are very sporadic," said Mark Schneiderman, director of education policy for the Software and Information Industry Association. "A minority of communities are doing a good or very good job, but a large number are just not there on a number of levels."

Calvin Baker, superintendent of Vail School District, said the move to electronic materials gets teachers away from the habit of simply marching through a textbook each year.

He noted that the AIMS (Arizona's Instrument to Measure Standards) test now makes the state standards the curriculum, not textbooks. Arizona students will soon need to pass AIMS to graduate from high school.

But the move to laptops is not cheap. The laptops cost $850 each, and the district will hand them to 350 students for the entire year. The fast-growing district expects to have 750 students at the high school eventually.

A set of textbooks runs about $500 to $600, Baker said.

It's not clear just yet how the transition to laptops will work, he conceded.

"I'm sure there are going to be some adjustments. But we visited other schools using laptops. And at the schools with laptops, students were just more engaged than at non-laptop schools," he said.

Meanwhile, in Tennessee, history teachers were feeling the effects of supply and demand. When demand for Tennessee history texts plummeted after the state stopped requiring mandatory instruction for middle schoolers, the supply of appropriate texts evaporated, too.

Nashville still requires bits of Tennessee history be taught to students at all grade levels, but many teachers were lacking the materials they need to fulfill that requirement.

"The fact is that because we don't teach it in a standard class, textbook companies aren't producing a Tennessee textbook," said Brenda Ables, social studies coordinator for the state education department.