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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."

"Instead of mass-produced textbooks, the more than 3,100 sophomores in the state's largest district are learning from an online curriculum developed by their teachers over the summer with free software distributed over the web. "

Examples of online textbook resources? Don't have to own the textbook to use

CK-12 Foundation is a non-profit organization with a mission to reduce the cost of textbook materials for the K-12 market both in the U.S. and worldwide. Using an open-content, web-based collaborative model termed the "FlexBook," CK-12 intends to pioneer the generation and distribution of high quality educational content that will serve both as core text as well as provide an adaptive environment for learning through the FlexBook Platform™.

"They focused on multiple benefits of the 1:1 iPad initiative where high school seniors were issued iPads like textbooks at the beginning of the year. In a time where global communication, inquiry-based opportunities, and self-directed learning is how students manage the information revolution, it was refreshing to get to observe an iLearning Utopia."

"This textbook is the result of over a year of collaboration between several individuals. Garth Holman, the Social Studies department chair and 7th grade world history teacher envisioned this project as a way to engage students through the use of technology and help them see the "big picture" that is often lost, or ignored, in history classes. Beginning in the summer of 2006, Garth began working with a student teacher, Michael Pennington (Currently teaching at Chardon Middle School). Another member of this project was Angie White, an intervention specialist at Beachwood Middle School (now at Hilltop Elementary in Beachwood CIty Schools). Angie provided a strong knowledge of curriculum differentiation and techniques to include students of varying abilities. A project of this nature, allows students to disseminate knowledge in a digital format that is congruent to the world in which they live. Our students are digital natives and this new technological paradigm allows for the democratization of knowledge. Wiki technology and the ability to instantaneously communicate across cultures and physical boundaries means that nothing our students create is isolated. We not only want our students to learn, but understand how the puzzle pieces fit to create the world in which we live."

The Students' History A digital history textbook created by students, for students!!! A collaboration between Two Middle Schools.

"In addition to learning our content and curriculum standards, today's students also need to be able to do the following effectively: collaborate with one another, synthesize ideas, create content, communicate ideas clearly, and use technology. A great way to accomplish all of these learning goals is to have students create movies of classroom content (i.e., textbook) to share with each other."

"Out of Print highlights the sea change underway in the multi-billion dollar U.S. K-12 instructional materials market enabled by recent technology and intellectual property rights innovations. With a focus on the ultimate impact on student learning, the report provides examples of lessons learned from recent digital and open (OER) content initiatives by leading states and school districts and offers comprehensive recommendations for government, industry, and educators to ensure that the inevitable shift to digital instructional materials improves student achievement and engagement and efficiently uses scarce resources."

Arne Duncan's address to an ASCD group

"digital graphic organizers are more versatile. In Google Apps, there's a highly powerful yet highly overlooked app called Drawings. It gives users a blank canvas where they can add text, shapes, lines, etc. When done, they can save their work as image files or PDF files and can add those images to documents, slides and spreadsheets."