Making School Created Digital Texts, Part 3: Making it Happen

Making School Created Digital Texts, Part 3: Making it Happen

Teachers in the 1990’s were for the most part provided textbooks, teacher’s guides, lab manuals and workbooks.  Many schools had libraries with audiovisual departments.  How many of us remember filmstrips and laserdiscs?  Teachers did not create class web pages nor need to search for or create the materials need for their classrooms.  Now we expect teachers do all of these things in addition to their usual duties and responsibilities.

In the early 1990’s we did not have the technologies that we do now to create media rich content for our classrooms.  We can create very targeted material to meet our individual instructional needs and highly personal learning experiences for our students. How we access and create content has changed radically from the 1990’s. To reflect this change we need to change how we work as schools and departments when it comes to curriculum writing and developing content.

Many schools are a couple of years out from full 1:1 deployment of iPads or other device.  It is during this time of transition that schools should have an eye on future development of digital texts and media. Creating the elements that will become part of a digital text is the most time consuming part of the process.  As schools adopt and adapt the new common core standards curriculum review committees should begin the process of collecting materials for creating these textbooks.  Teacher’s can collect smart notebook lessons, slideshows, video lab experiments and lessons. If departments work collectively to create a repository of such elements when it comes to creating the final product you are that much closer.  Organization is half the battle.

If districts are to move from purchased text to school created materials they should invest time and resources to the development of these initial texts. This could take the form of summer curriculum and textbook writing. Making smaller texts around units or themes of instruction may make it easier to get a handle on the process. Once these initial texts are created then maintenance and updating will be much easier to manage at a teacher or department level.

Planning is the key for schools to create digital textbooks.  The materials that would be included in an interactive text need to be created and collected.  A time consuming process but if done in a collaborative thoughtful process then manageable, “many hands make light work”. The texts, at least their outline, should be created as part of the curriculum writing process.  Once materials are collected and the texts outline then books can be assembled. As educators we have never had such an opportunity to create engaging and target resources to support our student’s individual learning.  Our learning environments will never be the same.

5 thoughts on “Making School Created Digital Texts, Part 3: Making it Happen

  1. Hi Beth!

    I would LOVE to see schools moving towards using custom-created content in the classroom. It could be very focused on specific subjects, and instructors can go more or less in depth as needed. How great it would be too to have content that students don’t just read, but become engrossed in as well! With how digitized everything is becoming nowadays, this is a wonderful step out of many in modernizing the classroom. A great article once again. Thank you!

    Daniel

  2. Hello Beth,
    My name is Derkesha Dale, and I am a student in EDM310 at the University of South Alabama. I enjoyed reading your post on making classrooms more digital. It would be hard for teachers to try and do their normal duties as well as the new ones, but like you mentioned, “many hands make light work”. With that being said, everyone should want to come together and pitch in for the digital created texts.

  3. Daniel and Derkesha,

    As I mentioned in another comment, it is an opportunity that is too good to pass up. The new technology & tools that allow us to access and create content these days do not necessarily make things easier, it just makes things different. For example once upon a time we used to calculate grades and averages by hand. Now computer grading programs keep a running average for us. We no longer calculate our grades but instead we post our assignments and resources online. These new tools are often looked as creating “additions too” our work load when more accurately we need to be thinking “instead of.” We have changed how we do things, which should also change what we do.

  4. Beth,
    My name is Lindsay Curtis, and I too am from the University of South Alabama, and a part of the EDM 310 class. I am ever amazed at the way technology is shaping our lives. As a future educator, I have to ask myself, am I prepared for the future of education? Thoughts like yours encourage me that the future classroom will be a place of engagement and exciting learning! I am eager to see what the future holds! Thank you for your post!

  5. Beth,
    I agree that we should make classroom textbooks digital. I can probably count on one hand how often I use the texts in my class now. They mainly are used for background information and then I go beyond the content of the text to expand my lesson. I’m usually doing research on the internet to bring more meaning to my lessons. Between using videos on different websites or the interactive whiteboard, I hardly find good enough reason to keep these texts and let them take up space. Creating digital textbooks would be very time consuming and not many teachers would be willing to work beyond the school day to complete this. I think it would be best suited as an extra pay sort of project over the summer. I would love for my district to head in this direction. The money saved from not purchasing new text books could be used to pay the teachers putting in the time and effort to create digital textbooks.

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