Tag Archive for ‘digital textbook’
Knowing Where to Find High Quality #OER so You Don’t Need to Reinvent The Wheel
To jump directly to what you are searching for, use these links: (from open4us.org) General Search Photo/Image Search Video Search Audio/Music Search General Education Search Recorded Lectures & Video Tutorials Search Open Textbook Search Simulation and Animation Search Modular Course Components Search Complete Courses Search Gooru (for K-12, Common Core State Standards Aligned) OER Commons… Read More ›
Online Course : Using #OER to Create K-12 Curriculum
Great news! An online PD course is launched : Using Open Educational Resources(OER) to Create K-12 Curriculum, it’s a long-time collaborative work from me and Digital Learning Tree learning system. Time to play and learn! . Why OER course for teachers matters In the contemporary educational landscape, emerging participatory practices facilitated by technological and socio-cultural developments,… Read More ›
Inclusive Learning Design to Rescue One-Size-Fits-All Flipped Classrooms (#OER)
In a world going digital, the accessbility of content does not seem to be a problem, right? Wrong! Many digital materials are NOT matching to different learners! Watching videos is worse than reading paper books ? Does one-size-fits-all happen in the filpped classrooms? Yes, if teachers think it’s all about watching videos at home…. Video content… Read More ›
Are Apps the New Textbook? (#edapps)
by Terry Heick, TeachThought.com : Are Apps the New Textbook? Apple’s recent entry into the textbook market was a bit anticlimactic after news of a “major announcement” rippled through the internet. The news that Apple would soon enable teachers to create personalized and interactive textbooks was interesting if you’re merging old ed-thinking with modern tech-thinking. Textbooks have… Read More ›
Make An eBook out of A Bunch of Resources Right Away
When more and more contents are digital and available online for free or for a affordable fee, it makes creating and sharing digital stuffs much easier and flexible. And the innovations of software from new ideas are growing everyday. What’s a Readlist? A group of web pages—articles, recipes, course materials, anything—bundled into an e-book you can… Read More ›
#OER in K-12 – Sharing Common Core
From Washington OER Project by Digital Learning Department, Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction : As the Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts and Mathematics are implemented, school districts will be looking for instructional material to meet the new standards. Open Educational Resources (OER) may help fill that need. Open educational resources (OER) are free and… Read More ›
5 New Free Tools for iPad Classrooms Worth Your Attention (#iPadEd)
Several new tools might be worth your attention for flipped classrooms or iPads classrooms. These tools are all free to use and meet different needs. GoClass (beta) Instructors can string together resources in a lesson plan format along with lecture notes and questions for formative assessment through a single app, and then deliver it through the… Read More ›
A New Chapter for Libraries
The bookless library – Is that the future of libraries? Question: As physical books go away, and computers and smart devices take their place, at what point does a library stop being a library, and start becoming something else? Our Relationship with Information is Changing Thomas Frey listed 17 primary categories of information that people turn to… Read More ›
Free Web-based Inquiry Science Environment (WISE)
Supported by the National Science Foundation, Web-based Inquiry Science Environment (WISE) is a free, online platform that engages students in the methods of real scientists and collaborative exploration of science issues through customizable curriculum and activities. Featured by Edutopia Technology Integration Research: Evidence-Based Programs by Subject : WISE has been shown to improve students’ science achievement, especially when teachers… Read More ›
Blended Learning Implementation Guide (#DLDay)
Blended learning is not ‘just another district initiative,’ It is a large scale opportunity to develop schools that are more productive for students and teachers. It’s a fundamental redesign of instructional model. In honor of Digital Learning Day, Digital Learning Now! (DLN) today released its fifth white paper in the DLN Smart Series, “Blended Learning Implementation… Read More ›
Boundless releases its content under Creative Commons
by Jane Park, first posted on Creative Commons Boundless, the company that builds on existing open educational resources to provide free alternatives to traditionally costly college textbooks, has released 18 open textbooks under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike (CC BY-SA), the same license used by Wikipedia. Schools, students and the general public are free to share and remix these textbooks… Read More ›
Open Content as Teacher Professional Development
Bill Fitzgerald at FunnyMonkey is a big advocator of open source software and open contents, he often provides insights about the practices in going open for education. His recent post about open content revisiting the definitions and considerations to move it forward meaningfully. Worth a read. In general terms, when we talk about open content, this… Read More ›
The Best E-Texts (App) Created by Academics
Rowe, professor of English at Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania, and Elliott Visconsi, associate professor of English at Notre Dame, have co-designed The Tempest iPad app, they re-imagined reading. Jennifer Funk gave this story a write-up here (edcetera). “We’ve made the text manipulatable,” Rowe says. “We’ve said, ‘You can get your hands inside this electronic text in any way… Read More ›
Free and Open Versions of Flat World Knowledge Texts
by Sean Connor, published on Saylor.org : Saylor.org now hosts free and open versions of Flat World Knowledge texts We are very pleased to announce that all Flat World Knowledge textbooks published under an open license are permanently and freely available from Saylor.org — free to read, free to download, free to share and remix under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA… Read More ›
Writing Textbooks at The Push of A Button
The first novel written by a computer has already been published four years ago. The future of content is increasingly becoming the stuff of science fiction. Not so sure? You must read this post from Singularityhub.com: PATENTED BOOK WRITING SYSTEM CREATES, SELLS HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS OF BOOKS ON AMAZON. Philip M. Parker, Professor of Marketing at INSEAD Business… Read More ›
Education-Focused Search Engine for K12
Gooru, a free search engine for learning, teachers and students can use Gooru to search for rich collections of multimedia resources, digital textbooks, videos, games and quizzes created by educators in the Gooru community. Collections are aligned to standards and currently cover every 5th-12th grade math, science and social science topic, with more subjects coming… Read More ›
Complementary Supports for the Achievement of All Students
Dr. Joy Zabala is a pioneer in special education and assistive technology. She is currently the Director of Technical Assistance for CAST and for the National Center on Accessible Instructional Materials (AIM Center) funded by the Office of Special Education Programs, US Department of Education. The AIM Center provides knowledge development, technical assistance and leadership to… Read More ›
What Makes Disruptive Digital Textbooks?
Free Textbooks Spell Disruption for College Publishers - this is how Technology Review talked about Boundless Learning, a Boston company that has begun giving away free electronic textbooks covering college subjects like American history, anatomy and physiology, economics, and psychology. Ariel Diaz started this company in 2011. What’s controversial is how Boundless creates these texts. The company trawls… Read More ›
ECAR Report of Undergraduate Students and Technologies
The use of devices such as laptops, tablets and smartphones is pervasive. According to the 2012 ECAR Study of Undergraduate Students and Information Technology, a full 86 percent of college students own a laptop, with smartphone ownership topping 60 percent. Clearly, there is need for these devices, and colleges increasingly are providing the infrastructure to make… Read More ›
California Passes Groundbreaking Open Textbook Legislation
by Timothy Vollmer, CreativeCommons.org It’s official. In California, Governor Jerry Brown has signed two bills (SB 1052 and SB 1053) that will provide for the creation of free, openly licensed digital textbooks for the 50 most popular lower-division college courses offered by California colleges. The legislation was introduced by Senate President pro Tem Darrell Steinberg and passed by the… Read More ›
Tactilize Aims To Make iPad Publishing Easy
(from TechCrunch) The iPad is a great canvas for beautiful apps, but unless you are a pretty competent developer or designer, getting your own content onto the iPad isn’t exactly easy. Tactilize wants to make it significantly easier for writers, photographers, videographers and anybody else who produces interesting content to feature – and monetize – their works on… Read More ›
(Infographic) Quick Facts about Digital Learning
by Zach Romeo, LearnStuff.com Technology has become an integral part of our daily lives: we use it to learn, to shop, to pay bills, and to entertain ourselves. Not surprisingly, younger generations are heavily influenced by computers in a way that changes the way they retain information and the ways they develop opinions about culture. Today… Read More ›
Digital Learning Now! Paper and Infographic
In the last decade, Americans have increasingly embraced mobile technology – smartphones, tablets, laptops, netbooks, and more – for personal use. In the classroom, these tools can be leveraged for content creation, online assessment, collaboration, and the advancement of the Common Core State Standards. The Digital Learning Now! Smart Series is a collection of… Read More ›
(Infographic) A Quick Review on Learning with Mobile Devices
There are many device options for 1:1 programs in digital classrooms, besides laptops the tablets have become very popular because of its mobility and convenience, so you might wonder ”which devices are best for digital textbooks?” This is a quick review on learning with tablets from onlineuniversities.com. And, T-Mobile also gave a mobile learning report card… Read More ›
Which Devices Are Best as Digital Textbooks?
If the school life isn’t sitting in rows waiting for the teacher to tell you what to learn, but instead is giving you technology to allow you to do your own research, wouldn’t you love to be in the class? Next month, Canada will start a new school–Inquiry Hub–with that sort of environment… Read More ›
Apple is Changing the Way We Learn
iBooks Author has a great potential in education. Teachers can create customized iBooks for students to read, or use those iBooks along with courses on iTunes U, and students can make iBooks as an assessment or presentation for learning topics. On the other hand, iTunes U will become a convenient tool at teachers’ disposal. Apple… Read More ›
The Learning Registry – An Infrastructure for Sharing
From the perspectives of education decision makers, the importance of sharing can’t be stressed enough for common benefits. The Learning Registry is designed to make sharing much easier in a digital world. With the Learning Registry, many kinds of information about learning resources can be shared efficiently. It’s an open source technical system designed to facilitate the exchange of data… Read More ›
Ten Elements of the Post-Textbook World
This is a guest post – ”Welcome to the Post Textbook World: Ten Elements” - from Tom Vander Ark. It was originally published on Getting Smart, where he wrote about his deep investigation on this topic. ***** A friend asked about Jay Mathew’s post on textbooks. I thought the rear view mirror critique of a process to pick… Read More ›
The Ultimate Hack – Re-coding Textbooks
Rob Reynolds just started his next book: “The Ultimate Hack: Re-coding Textbooks and Other Learning Content“. He will be posting drafts of all the chapters on his site, both the drafts and final product will be open and free. What’s the hacker culture to do with re-engineering textbooks that will work for the future? The digital containers to… Read More ›
Digital Textbooks from Educators
We’ve talked about “Why don’t Teachers Publish Their Own Textbooks ? (K12)“ with lots of examples of teachers building curricula, and “Growing Your Textbooks by Thinking Outside The Box“ is a broader view about the relationship of learning content and learners. We always appreciate the insights from educators, like this post from Learning and Teaching with iPad. Educators becoming creators has… Read More ›
Educators’ 10 Complaints against iBooks
If you are planning on an iPad pilot program, this curation of quality educational Apps will be useful for you. Have you read “Do iPads Really Improve Learning? Did you Miss Anything?” Maybe you like to know more about 18 Stories of iPads in Education. But What Do iPad Textbooks Mean to Education ? Do you know The 10 Most Common… Read More ›
OER Initiatives and the Vision from Maine
A study of kindergarteners in Auburn, Maine has shown that students who use iPads score better in every literacy test than those who don’t. We’ve discussed this here: “Do iPads Really Improve Learning? Did you Miss Anything?” The district has been working for a number of years on improving its early literacy efforts. That has involved extensive… Read More ›
You know OER is on the right track when the Secretary of Education said “OER matters”
Creative Commons, the U.S. Department of Education and the Open Society Institute announce the launch of the Why Open Education Matters Video Competition (CC Blog Post). The submission deadline is June 5, 2012, and the prizes include $25,000 (first), $5,000 (second), and $1,000 (Public Choice Award). You know OER is on the right track when the Secretary of Education said… Read More ›
Thought Provoking Sparks from SXSWEdu 2012
SXSWedu in Austin, Texas this week brought many innovative ideas to the forefront of discussion. If you need a quick catch on the trending topics, 6 Leading Trends at SXSWedu (from Sarah Cargill) is for you. According to 360KID, there are close to 10,000 tweets around this event. For the most thought provoking sparks (from… Read More ›
The Story about Future Classroom
The future of education displayed here is about all the numbers and trends in changing. We think the story is told succinctly by this infographic from Knewton and and Column Five Media. More details can be found in The Best Answers on “What is Digital Classroom ?” or this curation bag Shifting in teaching and learning. And, this SIG Disruptive Innovation could… Read More ›
What Do iPad Textbooks Mean to Education ?
Apple announced new moves about digital textbooks last month, including iPad textbook – iBooks 2, free authoring tool – iBooks Author. What’s the meaning to education? Will Apple revolutionize the ways we learn and teach? This is an infographic “iPads vs Textbooks” from OnlineTeachingDegree.
18 Stories of iPads in Education
No doubt, iPads have been changing many classrooms the ways of teaching and learning. Do you like to learn some real stories of using iPads in education? Check out this post composed by www.onlineuniversities.com with 18 stories! ***** You know from experience that when you enjoy a subject, learning about that subject is easier, more fun, and… Read More ›
Growing Your Textbooks by Thinking Outside The Box
It’s a Digital World, Why not Digital Textbook ? Now the answer is loud and clear. In this old post we briefly reviewed some stories about digital textbooks, and one of the viewpoints is definitely worth re-visiting : Some Resources For Moving Beyond Textbooks (by Patrick Larkin, from Connected Principals) “I think it is also important that we do not… Read More ›
Thoughts from Working with iBooks Author
Apple’s new movement in educational technology has drawn much attention in the past several days after announced, thearguments and discussion are still ongoing (link to scoop.it on this topic follow-up). According to Mashable reported yesterday, users have downloaded more than 350,000 textbooks in three days. Apple announced on its quarterly earnings call this afternoon(Jan.24th) that iBooks Author had seen 600,000 downloads, and iTunes U has… Read More ›
Why don’t Teachers Publish Their Own Textbooks ? (K12)
We would like to start this topic with this post “The Page is Dead! Long Live Curriculum“(from 2 cents worth) and share its strong perspective about “digital textbooks”, this is also what we believe as always. The transition into adoption of etextbooks is actually aiming a higher goal than just bringing cost down. We should… Read More ›
