The students do not learn "better" because my life as a teacher is "easier."
Convenience is not a form of effective pedagogy. My students learn better when
they take the active role in finding and choosing texts, asking their own
questions, and creating their own projects. In my 9th grade West Civ class, this
means students learn directly from primary sources (see the Internet History Sourcebook, the Perseus Project, the Library of Congress's 'Teaching with Primary
Sources' project, and the Internet Archive) without the filter of a
textbook middleman. It means that they keep daily blogs full of questions and
reflections on our learning and that they engage with our crowdsourced Q&A wiki.