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Tony Baldasaro

As Classrooms Go Digital, Textbooks May Become History - NYTimes.com - 1 views

  • And throughout the district, a Beyond Textbooks initiative encourages teachers to create — and share — lessons
    • Tony Baldasaro
       
      Makes me wonder of textbooks inhibit collaboration by teachers.
  • digitally nimble
  • And they think of knowledge as infinite
    • Tony Baldasaro
       
      This is a powerful quote. Thinking back to my schooling, it could probably be said that I thought of knowledge as finite, only limited to what my teacher and textbook said.
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  • With California in dire straits, the governor hopes free textbooks could save hundreds of millions of dollars a year.
    • Tony Baldasaro
       
      Too bad it took an economic crises to spur this movement.
  • “I don’t believe that charters and vouchers are the threat to schools in Orange County,” he said. “What’s a threat is the digital world — that someone’s going to put together brilliant $200 courses in French, in geometry by the best teachers in the world.”
    • Tony Baldasaro
       
      Wow! He is absolutely right on. Why take a course with based on a rigid time and place when one can learn at a place and pace that makes sense to them?
  • “We believe that the world is going digital, but the jury’s still out on how this will evolve,” said Wendy Spiegel, a Pearson spokeswoman. “We’re agnostic, so we’ll provide digital, we’ll provide print, and we’ll see what our customers want.”
    • Tony Baldasaro
       
      This is where I think textbooks companies need to lead. Customers typically only want more of the same, more of what has worked in the past, more of what has a track record. They dont' necessarily think beyond and/or have the luxury of being visionaries.
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    At Empire High School in Vail, Ariz., students use computers provided by the school to get their lessons, do their homework and hear podcasts of their teachers' science lectures. Down the road, at Cienega High School, students who own laptops can register for "digital sections" of several English, history and science classes. And throughout the district, a Beyond Textbooks initiative encourages teachers to create - and share - lessons that incorporate their own PowerPoint presentations, along with videos and research materials they find by sifting through reliable Internet sites.
Wanda Terral

Download free textbooks online - 44 views

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    Download free textbooks online: Bookboon's free online textbooks for students are focused and to the point. They are all written by highly respected professors from top universities in the world and cover topics such as economics, statistics, IT, engineering and natural science.
trisha_poole

South Korea Says Good-Bye To Print Textbooks, Plans To Digitize Entire Curriculum By 20... - 92 views

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    Like a band of summer vacation-crazed high school students, South Korea is tossing their textbooks into the great bonfire of "No More Pencils, No More Books…!" No, they're not entering an indefinite period of state-organized hooky, they are doing away with those burdensome textbooks and digitizing their entire curriculum. In an effort to enable education through technology while bringing down costs, all materials are expected to be digitized by 2015. When the effort is complete, students will be able to learn when and where they want.
Clint Heitz

Department of Psychology | JMU - 10 views

  • If the new trend in textbooks is moving them to computer screens, the switch could have negative consequences as many suggest that people skim more, process more shallowly, and may retain less information when reading online, Daniel said.
  • he readers’ goals are different: Individuals reading an e-book for enjoyment aren’t required to pass a comprehension-based test afterward. While they found that learning is possible from both formats, learning from e-textbooks takes longer and requires more effort to reach the same level of understanding, even in a controlled lab environment. At home, students report taking even more time to read e-textbooks as well as higher rates of muti-tasking (e.g., Facebook, electronic chat, texting, email, etc.) than do their peers using printed textbooks.
  • In their preliminary findings, the scanning pattern produced when the student read a textbook showed consistent reading from line to line down the page. But the scanning pattern from reading on the screen was less intense.
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  • Daniel and Jakobsen argue that the information dense textbooks characteristic of natural and social science subjects are not a good fit for current e-textbooks, but there are exceptions for subjects like chemistry and math that include doing formulas and other activities. The liability, Daniel emphasizes, comes when math and chemistry teachers hope their students will learn the explanations, not just the formulas, “Students tend to skip the text and go straight to the formulas, especially if they are graded.”
Patti Porto

McGraw-Hill upgrades digital textbook with new SmartBook - 2 views

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    "McGraw-Hill, one of the more prominent textbook publishers, is looking to take digital textbooks to another level, announcing its new SmartBook for college students."
Christian King

Inquire - An Intelligent Textbook - 156 views

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    An intelligent textbook for iPad being developed. Kind of what I thought the disappointing iBooks platform was going to be about. Is this the future of textbooks?
trisha_poole

We Don't Need Digital Textbooks, We Just Need Digital Education | Singularity Hub - 0 views

  • Have you ever seen a grassy lawn on a college campus with a multitude of little dirt paths criss crossing it? Each trail is worn by students making the same decision, branching where someone thought to head somewhere new and others followed. That’s the right model for how we should let students teach themselves.
    • trisha_poole
       
      Metaphor for textbooks and learning?
  • We need writers, and filmmakers, and animators, and everyone else who generates educational content. We need editors and watchdogs to evaluate the content and make sure it is good. We need teachers who can hold students hands as they walk their educational path, and who can inspire them to explore areas they may find boring at first. We need supervisors and tests to evaluate how well this system is working. We need parents and communities to decide our expectations for that system. We need all those things.
  • The future of education doesn’t depend on us digitizing and updating textbooks, it will rely on us leaving the textbook format behind entirely.
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  • Every page of Life on Earth will be filled with compelling animations of biological processes, real footage of organisms, and interviews with scientists. The textbook won’t be a dead piece of paper, it will be alive, constantly updated by the latest in scientific understanding. There will likely be homework servers and online forums to connect students together.
anonymous

Supplementing Textbooks with Student Constructed Knowledge Bases | 1 to 1 Schools - 4 views

  • While the eTextBooks initiative is a wonderful stride forward from our old paper textbooks it’s still essentially a re-constituted content delivery system that wasn’t designed or intended to change the one-way process of educational exchanges.
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    While the eTextBooks initiative is a wonderful stride forward from our old paper textbooks it's still essentially a re-constituted content delivery system that wasn't designed or intended to change the one-way process of educational exchanges.
Steve Ransom

The Associated Press: Japan fattens textbooks to reverse sliding rank - 9 views

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    Alarmed that its children are falling behind those in rivals such as South Korea and Hong Kong, Japan is adding about 1,200 pages to elementary school textbooks. The textbooks across all subjects for six years of elementary school now total about 4,900 pages, and will go up to nearly 6,100.
anonymous

The English Teacher's Companion - 0 views

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    New blog from Jim Burke, author of many books, englishcompanion.com, englishcompanion.ning.com
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    "Please turn on your textbooks and upload your homework..." In five years (three? two?!) I will not ask my high school students to open the 6.5 pound textbooks that currently sit on the floor under the desks. Nor will I bemoan their reluctance to look up words or mark up the text as they read. I will not wonder how to meet the needs of the 35% of my class who have learning disorders, most of which are language processing disorders of one form or another. Instead, I will ask them to get out their digital textbooks (what will we call them: DBooks? DBs? ETexts? Readers?) and "read the assigned story." Here is what will be different:
Miguel Rodriguez

A Textbook Example of What's Wrong with Education | Edutopia - 0 views

  • A Textbook Example of What's Wrong with Education A former schoolbook editor parses the politics of educational publishing.by Tamim Ansary var addthis_options = 'delicious, digg, facebook, google, reddit, stumbleupon, twitter, more'; Print Forward addthis_pub = 'glef'; Share Comments(38) Comment RSS Click to enlarge pictureThe Muddle Machine Credit: Monte Wolverton Some years ago, I signed on as an editor at a major publisher of elementary school and high school textbooks, filled with the idealistic belief that I'd be working with equally idealistic authors to create books that would excite teachers and fill young minds with Big Ideas. Not so. I got a hint of things to come when I overheard my boss lamenting, "The books are done and we still don't have an author! I must sign someone today!" Every time a friend with kids in school tells me textbooks are too generic, I think back to that moment. "Who writes these things?" people ask me. I have to tell them, without a hint of irony, "No one." It's symptomatic of the whole muddled mess that is the $4.3 billion textbook business. Textbooks are a core part of the curriculum, as crucial to the teacher as a blueprint is to a carpenter, so one might assume they are conceived, researched, written, and published as unique contributions to advancing knowledge.
    • Miguel Rodriguez
       
      I have worked as an editor for an educational publisher myself and, let me tell you, a lot of this sounds really familiar!
Bob Calder

CK12.ORG - FlexBooks - 134 views

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    Customizable, standards-aligned, free digital textbooks for K-12 - Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics
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    No love for ELA. :(
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    "customizable, standards-aligned, free digital textbooks for K-12"
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    Create custom curriculum FlexBooks with the content you want, and even edit, add additional resources to this content.   Books can then be made available in a variety of formats, PDF, HTML, Online reader.
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    Customizable online textbooks for a variety of subjects. History is full of terrific primary sources.
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    open access textbooks resources for iPad included here
trisha_poole

Why Textbooks Should Be Open Source [Infographic] - Edudemic - 31 views

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    Open source textbooks are a great idea!
Steve Ransom

7 in 10 Students Have Skipped Buying a Textbook Because of Its Cost - Students - The Ch... - 22 views

  • "Students recognize that textbooks are essential to their education but have been pushed to the breaking point by skyrocketing costs,"
  • does not measure the academic consequences for students who do not purchase textbooks
  • 78 percent of those students who reported not buying a textbook said they expected to perform worse in that class, even though some borrowed or shared the textbook.
Jess Hazlewood

"Where's the Writer" TETYC March 2014 - 43 views

  • “Responders Are Taught, Not Born”
  • We contend that student writers will see greater value in peer response if they develop tools that allow them to participate more actively in the feedback process. With teaching suggestions like those above, writers can learn how to re-flect on their experiences with peer response. They can also learn to identify their needs as writers and how to ask questions that will solicit the feedback they need.
  • We like to limit each mock session to no more than seven minutes of back and forth between respondent and writer.
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  • class suggests that the writer’s question
  • This becomes a teachable moment. When the respondent asks for assistance from the class, this break in the session becomes an opportunity for the class to assist the writer and the respondent. The writer appears stuck, not knowing what to ask. And the respondent appears perplexed, too.
  • we follow Carl Anderson’s suggestion to teach students how to ask questions about their writing through role-playing.
  • dynamic list that students freely update throughout the semester on the class classro
  • organize the questions within categories such as tone, content, evidence-based support, style, and logistics
  • The end result is a robust list of questions for writers to ask of their respondents.
  • in-class discussion about effective and less effective questions for writers
  • raft three to five questions they have about the assignment to ask of their peers as they prepare to write or revise their assignment. When appropriate, we can direct our students to the course text, where there are
  • : pointing, summarizing, and reflecting
  • Students’ comments often point to their struggle to position themselves in peer response.
  • “What would it take for you to be in-vested as writers in peer response?” Students’ typical responses include the following:>“I need to know what to ask.” >“I don’t know what to ask about my writing, except for things like punctua-tion and grammar.”>“Does the person reading my work really know what the assignment is? Bet-ter than I do?”>“I’m not really sure if I’m supposed to talk or ask questions when someone is giving me feedback about my work, so I don’t really do anything. They write stuff on my paper. Sometimes I read it if I can, but I don’t really know what to do with it.”
  • it is important to offer activities to ensure that both respondents and writers are able to articulate a clear purpose of what they are trying to accomplish. These activities, guided by the pedagogies used to prepare writing center consultants
  • devote more attention to the respondent than to the writer, we may unwit-tingly be encouraging writers to be bystanders, rather than active participants, in the response process.
  • , “Feedback: What Works for You and How Do You Get It?”
  • highlight the value of both giving and getting feedback:In 56 pages near the end of this book, we’ve explained all the good methods we know for getting feedback from classmates on your writing. . . . The ability to give responses to your classmates’ writing and to get their responses to your own writing may be the most important thing you learn from this book. (B
  • we question whether textbooks provide emergent writers with enough tools or explicit models to engage actively in peer response conversations.
  • While such questions are helpful to emerging writers, who depend on modeling, they lack explanation about what makes them “helpful” questions. As a result, emerging writers may perceive them as a prescriptive set of questions that must be answered (or worse, a set of questions to be “given over” to a respondent), rather than what they are intended to be: questions that could advance the writer’s thoughts and agenda.
  • this information is limited to the instructor’s manual
  • llustrates the difference be-tween vague and helpful questions, pointing out that helpful questions
  • You will need to train students to ask good questions, which will help reviewers target their attention.Questions like “How can I make this draft better?” “What grade do you think this will get?” and “What did you think?” are not helpful, as they are vague and don’t reflect anything about the writer’s own thoughts. Questions like “Am I getting off topic in the introduction when I talk about walking my sister to the corner on her first day of school?” or “Does my tone on page 3 seem harsh? I’m trying to be fair to the people who disagree with the decision I’m describing” help readers understand the writer’s purpose and will set up good conversations. (Harrington 14, emphasis added
  • uestions” when soliciting feedback (like the advice we found in many textbooks), she also provides explicit examples for doing so
  • he most explicit advice for writers about ask-ing questions and, in effect, setting up good conversations is buried in an instruc-tor’s manual for The Allyn & Bacon Guide to Writing. In thi
  • “Getting Response” chapter later in the book, they will benefit from the textbook authors’ instructions that they should in fact use questions that will help them solicit their feedback
  • dependent on what parts of the textbook they choose to read
  • point writers to a specific set of questions that they should ask of their respondents. Such instructions take a notable step toward shifting the locus of control from the respondent to helping writers engage their peers in conversation.
  • there is no mention that writers might use them for purposes of soliciting feedback.
  • we see an opportunity for modeling that is not fully realized.
  • we argue that Faigley offers respondents specific examples that empower them to actively engage the process and give feedback. We contend that emergent writers need a similar level of instruction if they are to be agents in response.
  • textbook authors offer few examples for how to get specific feedback
  • Peter Elbow and Pat Belanoff ’s first edition of A Community of Writers published in 1995, in which eleven “Sharing and Responding” techniques, d
  • we worked to understand how textbooks highlight the writer’s role in peer response.
  • We wanted to know what books tell writers about asking questions
  • lthough we do not discount the importance of teaching respondents how to give feedback, we argue that writers must also be taught how to request the feedback they desire.
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    Writer's role in soliciting feedback during peer edit. Suggestions for modeling and training.
Roland Gesthuizen

Many-to-One vs. One-to-Many: An Opinionated Guide to Educational Technology - The Ameri... - 9 views

  • MOOCs do not benefit most of those who try them. Students differ in their cognitive abilities and learning styles. Even within a relatively homogenous school, you will see students put into separate tracks. If we do not teach the same course to students in a single high school, why would we expect one teaching style to fit all in an unsorted population of tens of thousands?
  • I believe that the future of teaching is not one-to-many. Instead, it is many-to-one. By many-to-one, I mean that one student receives personalized instruction that comes from many educators. To make that work, technology must act as an intermediary, taking the information from the educators and customizing it to fit the student's knowledge, ability, and even his or her emotional state.
  • I am optimistic about tablets in large part because I believe that a magic bullet in educational technology is the adaptive textbook. By that, I mean an electronic textbook that adjusts to the cognitive ability and learning style of the student. Adaptive textbooks will query students in order to make sure that they understand what they have been studying. They will also respond to student queries. Adaptive textbooks will implement the many-to-one teaching model.
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  • There are many horses in the educational technology race. The ones to bet on are adaptive textbooks and independent certification.
  • I do not believe that educators fully understand the process of social learning in the classroom. We do not know exactly what factors make the difference between a classroom where students are of significant help to one another and one where students provide little assistance or even hold one another back
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    "This essay will explain why I label various technologies as winners, losers, and magic bullets in the table below. My opinions are not based on exhaustive research. They are based on my experience both as a high school teacher and as an entrepreneur." My evaluations are based on whether I view these technologies as supporting a model of education that is one-to-many or a model that is many-to-one. The latter is the model I prefer, as will become clear in the rest of this essay.
Michele Brown

Save Money. Study Faster. Ace the Class. | Boundless - 26 views

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    Online learning platform that helps students master concepts without relying heavily on expensive textbooks.  Customized to the students course and assigned textbook.  Focused towards higher education.
Randolph Hollingsworth

Ethics, Wikipedia and the History Textbook « Lisa's (Online) Teaching Blog - 1 views

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    curating/freezing Wikipedia entries so stable/same for a whole course time period as a student resource (vs. textbook)
Roland Gesthuizen

Moving at the Speed of Creativity - Copying the Textbook is NOT an Acceptable Assignment - 64 views

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    "Testing isn't teaching. Making students copy entire chapters out of their textbook as "a regular weekday assignment" isn't acceptable teaching, either."
psmiley

27 Places For Free Textbooks Online - 110 views

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    Free textbooks online
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