Search results matching tag 'textbook'

Create Your Own Textbook

Anonymous — Wed, 16 May 2012 12:00:00 GMT

I came across an interesting article from MindShift. It gave instructions on how to create your own classroom textbook (with or without Apple).

As the open education movement continues to grow and become an even more rich trove of resources, teachers can use the content to make their own interactive textbooks. It might seem daunting, but the availability of quality materials online and the power of tapping into personal learning networks should make it easier. Here's how to create a digital textbook and strategies for involving the students in its development in three steps.

Aggregation: Gather all your sources of information. The best way is through social bookmarking with great online tools such as Diigo, which allows you to bookmark sites that can be seen and shared online. Teachers can work with collegues within thier subject area departments and beyond the walls of the classroom to gather resources (such as Twitter which I gather most of my ideas!)
Curation: While gathering resources, the process of curation involves a deeper analysis of those sites to select the ones that have the most relevant material for a particular topic. Use your syllabus or state standards to pick content for a unit of study. Focus on essential questions to help you choose your resources. Use web 2.0 tools to make your textbook engaging by using images, videos, and simulations. Even putting them on online magazines such as LiveBinders and Scoop-it! (are great resources).
Creation: This is the most important part of the process. You can create an online repository using a wiki digital tool that organizes your resources neatly. One great tool now is Google Sites that allows you to create and share webpages, that have lots of customizable features. You now have iBooks Author that you can also do it on.

I tried to minimize all the material to its basics, but check out the full article here: http://blogs.kqed.org/mindshift/2012/01/how-to-create-your-own-textbook-with-or-without-apple/

Discovery Education's "Beyond the Textbook" Forum, Part 2

Anonymous — Sat, 17 Mar 2012 13:17:00 GMT

While some schools have fancy Madagascar hissing cockroaches, we made do with an American cockroach, the huge one found in norther Jersey.

A child volunteered that she her dad had caught one at work, and wondered if she might bring it in. I loved the idea, most of the class groaned, and the next day she waltzed in with a margarine tub poked with holes.

(This says a lot about the child who was curious, about her father who saved a "pest" for his curious child, about our town where kids can freely talk of cockroaches without being ostracized, and about our school where kids believe that bringing in cockroaches is an option. Think what you will, I love Bloomfield!)

Once the class settled down a bit--a 1 1/2" live cockroach in a classroom beats the Krebs cycle any day--a few kids started paying attention to this critter, one they knew they were supposed to hate.

Cockroaches like to groom themselves--and our particular cockroach, when trapped in a Petri dish groomed her antennae incessantly like a nervous tic.

This is what a scientist sees:

Antennal grooming behavior consists of the following sequence of events: 1) medial rotation of the head coincides with the raising and extending of the foreleg opposite (contralateral) the antenna to be groomed; 2) the flagellum in the region of annuli 15-20 is contacted by the fore tibia and adduction of the foreleg bends the flagellum to the mouth parts; 3) the foreleg returns to the substrate; 4) rapid lateral movement of the maxilla and labium on the flagellum as it moves through the mouth parts; and 5) the flagellum returns to the original, extended position, and the maxilla and labium continue to move for a short time. This sequence of five events comprises one episode of antennal grooming.

A child sees a creature "cleaning" herself, taking care of herself, getting nervous--a child sees herself in the movements of a creature she was taught to hate, and an odd thing happens.

The child becomes interested in a cockroach, a once reviled critter. She looks some more. She falls in love. She becomes an entomologist.

***

You cannot love (or know) the idea of things unless you love (or know) at least one thing that represents that idea. A child who loves bugs loves them because she knows something about particular bugs.

You can go through life loving abstract ideas more than living, and many of us do. (Those who chase the abstract seem happy enough, and they're are plenty of days I do the same--Go, Giants! Our economy depends on this.)

If you want to create children interested in science, though, the abstract must emanate from the real. You need to let them play with cockroaches and magnets and balls. You need to let them fall into puddles, to fall out of trees, to scrape knees as they master something they can truly know, not mere ideas pushed on them by a culture that honors magical thinking.

***

And what does any of this have to do with textbooks?

Any educational tool that honors the abstract above the real helps foster magical thinking. Magicians make lousy scientists, have no need for math, and design crummy bridges.

Traditional textbooks exist to be sold. The larger the market, the less attached to the real, to the local, they must become, unless "the local" means a market as large as Texas, whose laws affect the content of science textbooks.

Pearson started as a construction company, nothing wrong with that, and now aims to take control of the education business, whatever that means. It is a publicly owned company, PSO on the New York Stock Exchange, nothing wrong with that either, as long as it's understood that their primary obligation is to earn money for its stakeholders.

Pearson's latest financial data from Google

Our school bought a wonderful set of textbook's from Pearson last year--Campbell Biology, a wonderful and hefty book that I love to read. But I already love biology.

My students (in, ironically, the abstract sense) are not reading the book. They do not care how beautiful the photos are, how accurate the words, how much money their town spent on them. They do not dive into the website set up for them, they do use the CD that comes with the book.

But I bet if it had a photo of something we did in class last week they'd all take a peek at that page.

***

Discovery Communications, inc., is also publicly owned, you can follow them on NASDAQ. Discovery Education holds a huge influence in our classrooms, providing free digital and media (redundant?) through the internet. Pearson, of course, does the same, but the two are coming from different angles.

Discovery Education has bought a piece of my time--I've learned more about them in the past few days than the past decade. I'm not immune to influence, and I'm a sucker for anything that allows me to hang out with folks wiser than me.

They think I might have some ideas on how to reach kids through the next-generation tool--I'd love to drop the word textbook, it's too limiting--we'll find in our classrooms.

***

So why am I doing this?

It looks like fun.
1) We have been assured that this is not meant to be a direct promotional bid by Discovery--anyone who's been kidnapped by time-share schemes knows the dangers of committing oneself to a confined space.

It looks like fun
2) Steve Dembo wants us to spread our ideas publicly before we even meet. Not sure his bosses are keen on this, but his emphasis on sharing ideas openly makes this more than a junket. (/me waves to the Pearson folks....)

It looks like fun
3) I'm older than most folks bleating the tech story, and age has tempered my enthusiasm. A conference like this needs an old goat, a Luddite, a keeper of tradition, if nothing else than for amusement. If I had a choice, I'd take a slate board over a SmartBoard, for several valid reasons. (To be fair, though, my typewriter's collecting dust as I write this.)

It looks like fun
4) It's free and I'm cheap.

It looks like fun
5) I love train rides. Trains are older than planes, buses, cars, and rocket ships. You could look that up.

It looks like fun
6) At the risk of being influenced, and there's no pretending that I am not, I get to have some input into an extraordinarily important process. Last time I got to do anything like this was back in 1993 when I served on a sub-subcommittee for the Clinton Task Force on National Health Care Reform chaired by his wife. Not sure I accomplished much, if anything, but I got a nice train ride and a few free meals (see 4 and 5 above).

It looks like fun
7) I get to grovel and apologize (and apologise) to varied folks who have tried to drag me into the 21st century. (Lessee, I already apologized to Eric, there's Alex, Dean, Tom, good Lord, Jon, David--is there anyone online I haven't tangled with?)

It looks like fun
8) I have my Principal's blessing, Chris Jennings, who just won a NASSP Breakthrough School award last week in Tampa. We're good. We want to get better. Mixing with folks from around the continent can only help.

Next up?
My dream school toolkit....

Downside? I hate missing classes. We got a lot of stuff going on in Room B362, and never enough time.

Cockroach photo from Virginia Cooperative Extension, Virginia Tech, and Virginia State University, used with implicit permission.

What if Your Textbooks Were Free and Customizable?

Anonymous — Tue, 31 May 2011 22:40:22 GMT

As the school year winds down, you might be thinking about what new or different books you hope to use in the fall. If you are, I encourage you to check out Open Educational Resources (OER) textbooks. OER or “Open Source” textbooks are digital, often customizable, textbooks published and available on the web. Many of them are quite comprehensive and are written by highly-qualified professionals with advanced degrees. These books also often include interactive elements and multimedia such as sound and video. Best of all, they’re free. In the Classroom Here are some OER sources you can explore. Since these are open and free, you’ll see that you can pick and choose from multiple sources for your students instead of having to commit to one textbook from one publisher. Many of them are also available in PDF format for download and to print either for free or for a … Continue reading →

The Internet Archive: One Very Big Collection of Multimedia

Anonymous — Wed, 18 May 2011 00:25:07 GMT

The Internet Archive is a huge, well…archive. Basically, it’s a collection of images, video, music, audio recordings, and texts. Once you explore this massive digital library though, you’ll see that it’s hard to get your head around just how much is collected here. For example, the audio section includes an archive of millions of recordings of everything from an audio version of The Quran to radio talk show recordings. The music section includes live music recordings from the Grateful Dead and millions of others. The text section, called the “Open Library,” includes millions of documents from textbooks to novels and … Continue reading →

Interactive “A Jury of Her Peers”

Anonymous — Sat, 04 Dec 2010 16:13:45 GMT

Hello fellow teachers and tech integration enthusiasts. I’m back from a short break. A major project in my graduate class has kept me away from blogging for nearly two weeks. The good news is I’ve been developing an interactive Shakespeare website I’ll soon be able to introduce here. For now, I’ve got another interactive text to tell you about. It is part of “Interactives” by Annenberg Media—a collection of lessons which span across the curriculum and that are meant to “enhance and improve students’ skills in a variety of curricular areas.” These activities range from 3D Geometry and History to the subject of this blog—Language Arts. Only four Language Arts “Interactives” are available at this time, but it is easy to imagine connections between Language Arts and some of the activities in other subjects such as history. For example, anyone teaching Marlowe or Shakespeare might find the Renaissance Interactives in the history section very useful.

Of particular interest for those of us in high school Language Arts, the Interactive version of Susan Glaspell’s “A Jury of Her Peers” is a good one. It is a simple website with no frills but well-designed interactive elements that teach some of the basic literary elements of short fiction. Because the story is in the public domain, audio versions of it are easy to find on the web too, along with recordings of the stage version (called Trifles). I’ve provided some links below.
When you arrive at the site, click the wooden door on the right to delve into the murder mystery. Throughout the story, there are points where the reader can click an icon to explore a literary term such as Point of View which is the first one you will come across. When a reader clicks this icon, he or she is taken to a separate section where the concept is explained and applied to the story in the form of a series of engaging questions. Once the reader has explored the section about that particular literary term, she is directed back to the story and may continue reading. There are several literary terms to learn about before the end of the story.

Navigation is easy because each page offers icon links to continue on with the story or to return to the main page. The icons are illustrations which complement the story. The site is a bit plain visually, so it might be easy to overlook this valuable resource. However, what this site may lack in aesthetic design, it makes up for with its engaging lessons—it’s a great way to teach the elements of plot with a chilling murder mystery online. With each of the literary elements the reader is given an opportunity to not only read the definition of the term but to actually apply it to what she is reading too.

My only disappointment with the site is that there is no place for students to take notes or to record their answers to the questions posed about the story. An easy fix for this is to have students open Google Documents accounts and create a document where they can record their answers. This way it would be easy then to have them work collaboratively, share their ideas, and submit their work to you online while reading the story. Tabbed browsing is great for this kind of multitasking.

In spite of its graphic simplicity, the Interactive “A Jury of Her Peers” is a site worth bookmarking and adding to your list of Interactive Language Arts resources. It isn’t as flashy as other digital textbooks, but it is useful and it meets my requirements for being interactive and not just multimedia. The last page of the story also provides some links for more information about the author, literary criticism of her work, and other related resources.

On a final note, you may want to stick to reading this one with upper-classmen and AP students or you may need to provide basic readers with support, because the story is mostly appropriate for advanced readers. Even some of my honors-level freshmen struggled to understand all the subtleties of the story, so you’ll want to plan ahead for this.

Enjoy…

^Scott

Links:

Audio Version of “A Jury of Her Peers”

Audio Version of “Trifles,” the play version of the story

Interactive Shakespeare: A Really Cool, Totally Free Digital Textbook

Anonymous — Wed, 24 Nov 2010 03:48:18 GMT

November 23, 2010

It’s not hard to find Shakespeare resources on the internet. In fact, in a way it’s too easy, so teachers are often left to sift through thousands of bland websites in search of a unique and useful one. When I searched “Shakespeare Lesson Plans” on Google today, it garnered me more than 400,000 results. It’s hard to know where to start. But then I came across one that I think is especially remarkable, one that exemplifies everything I think of when I consider the term “interactive” in language arts. The Canadian Adaptations of Shakespeare Project (CASP) Interactive Folio and Study Guide: Romeo and Juliet is one of the finest interactive resources I’ve come across in my search for truly interactive language arts resources. This is how CASP describes it on their site:

“The Interactive Folio and Study Guide is the result of two years of research and design work by the CASP team to make use of its extensive expertise in both rethinking multimedia design contexts and creating substantive content for online dissemination. Effectively, the Interactive Folio and Study Guide is a new form of book, E-book, and hybrid online publication that is a an innovative new web resource giving users free access to a huge array of materials presented in an exciting, new, and wholly original interface (designed from the ground up by the CASP team).”

Yeah, it’s pretty cool. You’ve got to check it out.

The Interactive Romeo and Juliet offers a multimedia edition of the play that is engaging and very helpful for English teachers presenting the play to their classes and for students who are trying understand the text…but it does not dumb things down…it enhances them with pop-up commentary, embedded resources, audio, and video. And those resources are substantial. It will take you a while to explore them all, and they are all professionally designed and produced.

In the prologue, for example, clicking the word “prologue” activates a video clip from Madden’s and Stoppard’s Shakespeare in Love (the academy award winning film) that reenacts the play in the richness of a perfectly recreated 16^th Century England and a Rose theater reconstructed to spark the imagination. Kids love watching this clip because it pulls you into Shakespeare’s world and immerses you in it. Clicking the word “Two” in the first line activates an audio recording of Canadian actor Devin Pihlainen gracefully reciting the prologue. Other digitally enhanced elements include lexicon notes that explain terms like “ill-fated” and “misadventured,” making Shakespeare accessible for even the most remedial of readers. And perhaps most importantly, it presents Shakespeare in a new textual form—in a digital medium familiar to so many students toting iPhones and laptops. Interactive Romeo and Juliet is a really cool, totally free, digital textbook.

I can imagine supplementing the class reading with chosen passages or, if you have the available technology, reading the entire text on the computer with your classes. For closer reading and study, the “resources” section includes character descriptions, plot synopses, facts about the play, current research, and even interviews with Shakespeare scholars like Sky Gilber, Assistant Professor and University Research Chair. Do check your computers ahead of time as Adobe Flashplayer 8.0 is required.

The depth of resources on this web site is incredible. I spent over an hour and hardly explored a fraction of the content. It is really an entire online course of significant depth on Romeo and Juliet presented in highly engaging multimedia formats.

The possibilities are limited only by your imagination with this resource. If you don’t have time, however, to dream up lessons to complement the Interactive Romeo and Juliet text, the “Learning Commons” section provides dozens of lesson plans complete with teacher and student instructions, worksheets, and other printable resources. The worksheets and other printable resources are high quality, professional documents that would cost a lot in a textbook package. Here they are available for free to print or download.

My one bit of advice about exploring the Interactive Romeo and Juliet is to give yourself some time. If you are like me when I first discovered this site, you’ll find you’ve spent an entire prep period and a study hall without looking away from the screen. I think you’ll find this website is one you come back to every year to explore Romeo and Juliet with your students.

http://www.canadianshakespeares.ca/folio/folio.html

Enjoy,

^Scott

List of Favorite Websites and Resources for Interactive Whiteboards

Anonymous — Tue, 12 Oct 2010 01:14:02 GMT

Interactive whiteboards-SMARTboards, starboards, and the like-are the symbol of a new tech savvy age in teaching. Its a new level of interactive learning and teaching. It all sounds great, but man there is...

Penguin books previews ipad textbooks

Anonymous — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 01:59:07 GMT

Recently, Penguin UK gave a stunning preview of its plans for iPad-based e-books. The video clip is short and well worth your time. Don’t miss these segments: -1:07 the anatomy textbook that zooms into a still of the human heart and then transition to a 3d, rotating model of the beating heart -2:49 the digital constellation guide [...]

Free audio books, textbooks, and eBooks.... again!

Anonymous — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 14:04:00 GMT

Okay, I just realized the other day that I've been blogging for over a year now! In light of this, I figured it was a good time to review what some of my most popular blog posts have been during this last "blog year"..... so, to start things off, the most popular post of last year for the Talking Books Librarian blog was:

Free Audio books, textbooks, and eBooks - check out the post at http://tinyurl.com/freetextbooks

And the best thing about the link given in that blog post is that it's to a wiki, so it will be continually updated.... meaning you can easily keep up to date on all the latest free audio books, textbooks, and eBooks! And we all know, there's nothing better than free books... (and if you're a college student, especially free textbooks!)

Please feel free to share any other sites you like that offer free audio books, textbooks, or eBooks!

Free audio books, textbooks, and eBooks

Anonymous — Tue, 08 Jan 2008 15:00:13 GMT

Check out this great link for free audio books, textbooks, and eBooks!

http://librarianchick.pbwiki.com/

You can search for free books on the site at http://librarianchick.pbwiki.com/BookSearch