Digital Textbooks Don't Have It All, But What They Have Is So Cool.

I have been researching and thinking about modern textbooks for a few weeks, and I have put together this little movie on Powtoons. I hope that you will be edutained.

What do I use in my classroom?

I have access to digital technologies every day at school. I have a digital version of both the kids reading and math books. The kids have access to all this too, but we don't have the devices to take advantage of what we have. So, for now, we use what we can on the Smart-board, which I am so very grateful to have. The Journeys program reading textbook's only extra feature is that it can read to you all words on the page. I do use this feature and I can see how this would be so very helpful in the younger grades to model  what it should sound like and to help with decoding words for struggling readers. I do feel, however, that it could do so much more. Just adding links to the book so that students could explore more about the topics would take it to the next level.

The math series that the district just bought, Go Math, has much, much, more. We have slowly been gaining access to the materials, so I will admit that I am not sure that I even know everything that it can do. I have been trying different features. My students favorite is a skills practice that has four parts. It teaches the skill, which is often more than what we cover in one lesson, gives practice, has work on your own and ends with a quiz. I will start out some classes with part of this skill builder. I do encourage students to use them at home, but I have had limited responses to that very fine suggestion. In class, however, they love it. In the practice section it will tell them when they are right. This is actually how they refer to the program, "Can we do 'That's Right!'  Mrs. Lopez?" It is hard to turn down kids who can't wait to figure out math quickly on their whiteboards for the chance to type in an answer up front. Nothing is better to them to hear that movie phone voice say "That's Right!" Then I go into a daydream where we all have Chromebooks and decent wireless network in the building and think about how this would be if they all had their devices to do this part instead of their low tech white boards. That would be so cool. 

My research is all linked in my personally curated newspaper. Textbooks in the Modern World