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Vicki Davis

Apple says iBooks 2 app reinvents textbooks - latimes.com - 2 views

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    Ah, epaper. Digital books. They started as barely a blip but now have become the battleground for the next all out war between tech giants. "The app update -- which Apple is calling iBooks 2 and is already released to the iOS App Store -- will allow for textbooks to be sold through the popular app, which in the past sold novels, nonfiction and poetry, but not textbooks. All textbooks sold through the free app, which is available only to Apple's i-devices, will be priced at $14.99 or less -- a stark contrast to the high-priced paper books that fill college bookstores. But the main allure might not be the price as much as the interactive features iBooks textbooks can offer. Apple, which announced the iBooks update at a press event in New York at the Guggenheim Museum, said the iBooks textbook exceeds paper texts in terms of engagement, calling it a durable, quickly searchable book that offers easy highlighting and note-taking  as well as interactive photo galleries, videos, and 3-D models and diagrams.
Vicki Davis

McGraw Hill Launches First Digital-Only Textbook for K-12 at Iste - 5 views

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    McGraw-Hill launched its first all-digital, cloud-based textbook for the K-12 market on Monday at the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE) conference. This is called CINCH and is a "cloud based curriculum" for K-12 math and 7-12 science. It makes everything available through a browser. Citation: RT @TradRobinson - Publishers Launch First Digital-Only Textbook for K-12 http://t.co/C1Ny9ck via @mashabletech @mashable #ISTE11
Vicki Davis

Apple to announce tools, platform to "digitally destroy" textbook publishing - 1 views

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    The announcement from Apple this week concerning textbooks is coming where they say they will announce a "Garage Band" for textbooks app on their platform. If you want to know more, this arstechnica article is the one that seems to be getting the most attention.
Vicki Davis

American Democracy in Action - Student Wiki Textbook - 2 views

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    Students are writing their own textbooks. This one by The Advanced Placement United States GovernmentElectronic Textbook created by theSt. Gregory College Preparatory School'sSenior AP Government Class 2010 With such things that can be handed down to other students, so many questions come to mind including accuracy but also whether such a tool has value in lieu of traditional textbooks. 
Vicki Davis

Flat World Knowledge LLC - 0 views

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    Free textbooks will be available beginning Jan '09. Not sure what grade levels this will be available to (just college?).
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    Open source textbooks - this is a movement in that direction.
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    Interesting tidbit in their press release this week: "Flat World has announced 17 new author titles under contract. Flat World's in-classroom beta test gets underway this week, with 20 participating colleges and universities nationwide." Open Textbooks may be closer -- this model is a more hybridized version. If we had a "wiki to print" tool or technology, then we could literally have grassroots teachers writing and creating textbooks together. This is interesting to follow
Ruth Howard

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

  • 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. In fact, most of these books fall far short of their important role in the educational scheme of things. They are processed into existence using the pulp of what already exists, rising like swamp things from the compost of the past. The mulch is turned and tended by many layers of editors who scrub it of anything possibly objectionable before it is fed into a government-run "adoption" system that provides mediocre material to students of all ages.
  • There's no quick, simple fix for the blanding of American textbooks, but several steps are key to reform:
Vicki Davis

Introduction to Management - 3 views

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    Another Mooc, I got an email from Jeremy Short, the professor leading this course. I was a management major at Georgia tech, I love the incorporation of graphic novels into this course. Here's what Dr. Short sent me: "I'm a professor at the University of Oklahoma. My co-authors and I conducted a study that will soon be published in Business Communication Quarterly where we find that graphic novels are more effective than traditional textbooks for direct recall of material. The study used material about human motivation commonly taught in introductory management courses. In addition to the superior recall associated with the graphic novel version of the material, more than 80% of students indicated the graphic novel format compared favorably to traditional textbooks. Now anyone in the world can conduct their own study to see if their experiences match our findings, as I will be teaching a class beginning June 10 and ending July 15, that is free under the MOOC format and will feature a graphic novel textbook as well as a traditional principles of management text - both books I've co-authored. OU students can enroll through regular registration and take the course for credit, but anyone interested in the class can enroll for free under the non-credit option. The only cost of the class under the second option is the cost of the two texts, which can be purchased for under $100 total."
Vicki Davis

How to use Advanced Algebra II - 0 views

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    This open source textbook by Raleigh, N.C., math teacher Kenny Felder was part of the review of the first 16 digital texts submitted to California's review program as part of the free open-source digital textbook initiative by California's Governor Schwarzenegger. This textbook scored a 96 and met 26 of 27 standards. Felder teaches at Raleigh Charter High school.
Anne Bubnic

Open source, digital textbooks coming to California schools - 0 views

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    Open source, digital textbooks coming to California schools The cash-strapped Golden State has decided that, starting next school year, schools will be able to use open source, digital textbooks for a number of math and science subjects. Ars talked with Brian Bridges, the Director of the California Learning Resources Network, which will be reviewing the texts, to find out more about what the program entails.
Vicki Davis

Student Digital "Textbooks" using LiveBinders - 12 views

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    Here are Michael Thornton's student livebinders. These are textbooks written by the students. Except for the typo on Ancient Greece review, this is a marvelous example of having students build meaningful textbooks.Interestingly, Michael's livebinder puts together livebinders themselves. I'm going to be learning more about this tool and have my students use these this year.
Brendan Murphy

Corruption in textbook-adoption proceedings: 'Judging Books by Their Covers' - 12 views

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    I had no idea textbooks were so corrupt. I feel a bit dirty. 
Eloise Pasteur

Free Digital Texts Begin to Challenge Costly College Textbooks in California ~ Stephen'... - 0 views

  • Free Digital Texts Begin to Challenge Costly College Textbooks in California Expect to see more of this. Not only the writing and releasing of free textbooks. But also the attempts by publishers to lure their authors back into the commercial fold. They'll have to change their price points, though. As Tom Hoffman says, "he point is that there are lots of actors other than publishers who can pay a professor to write a text and release it under a free license, and $100,000 is not a lot of money to a state, country, large university or foundation."
Anne Bubnic

Free Digital Textbook Initiative [California] - 0 views

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    Governor Schwarzenegger, Superintendent O'Connell, and the State Board of Education have announced the Free Digital Textbook Initiative, a project to provide a list of standards aligned free digital textbooks for high schools that cover the course content in mathematics and science subject areas.
Maggie Verster

Should laptops replace textbooks? A poll- go vote! - 5 views

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    "The age of the textbook may be bowing out -- or it may not" So far laptops are winning.... Some interesting comments on the topic as well. Go vote!
Vicki Davis

The problem with Pearson-designed tests that threatens thousands of scores - 7 views

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    I agree. Students who got to read the passages ahead of time had an advantage - of course, is anyone looking to see if there was a "hit" on other textbook passages - is this luck or is it corruption. Either way - it smells like corruption. There is a conflict of interest if you're testing and selling textbooks to help kids do better on testing.  "students who read the Pearson test before seeing it on the state test had the opportunity to fill the gaps in their own knowledge-whether through class discussion or simply by reading and answering the questions provided in the curriculum-before they took the test. And that means that the validity of a test that aims to differentiate between "good" and "poor" readers is necessarily called into question. Unfortunately, it seems that New York education officials don't realize how significant this problem is. Or even that it is a problem. (Meryl Tisch, New York Board of Regents chancellor, actually defended the quality of the assessments, boasting that, thanks to a rigorous new quality-control review, the Department of Education had avoided the kinds of problems that lead to last year's now-famous pineapple scandal. And that failure to recognize what may be a far more serious and consequential challenge may be the biggest red flag that Common Core assessment decisions are in trouble in the Empire State."
Vicki Davis

AIM Open Textbook Initiative - 2 views

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    Open sourced textbooks that meet the criteria of the American Institute of Mathematics Editorial board. Students can download these in PDF format.
Vicki Davis

Kindle for iOS update brings boost to students and visually impaired | ITProPortal.com - 1 views

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    The recent Kindle updates over the past few months have quite a few teachers. In particular, if you have a textbook on Kindle, you can collate notes by color, which is a major enhancement.  This article does a nice job of summarizing the features important to educators. "The update also brings some changes that should be especially helpful for students and teachers, like the ability to highlight long passages that span multiple pages. In addition, the Notebook feature for textbooks has new filtering options, which should help you more quickly and easily find all your notes, bookmarks, and highlights by colour"
Vicki Davis

OpenStax College - 0 views

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    Free open textbooks that are peer reviewed to be of higher calibre. Free online and low-cost in print. If you're looking at options, this is where you should go (if you're curriculum director or administrator.) Start here for free open textbooks.
David Wetzel

5 Ways to Integrate Science Process Skills in Lessons - 16 views

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    Integrating the science process skills within your teaching does not require drastic changes. It simply involves making the process of science more explicit in lessons, investigations, and activities you are already using in your curriculum. The science process skills are the methods used for helping our students understand how we know what we know about the world in which they live. This often means going beyond a science textbook and supplementing the core-content within textbooks. It also means using your course content as a means for exposing students to the real process of science.
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