Digital Text Playbook

The U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and Federal Communications Chairman Julius Genachowski have released the "Digital Textbook Playbook" on transitioning to digital texts. The Playbook is organized into four sections that are designed to follow the timeline/issues that schools need to address when making a transition from primarily paper print to mostly digital resources:

Making the Transition to Digital Learning

School districts need dedicated and shared leadership, careful planning, and teacher and community engagement to create a successful digital learning environment.

Connectivity at School

The key to delivering sufficient connectivity is estimating current and future demand at the district, school, and classroom level. This will ensure that schools have enough bandwidth to serve their student body, faculty, and staff.

Connectivity Beyond the School Gates

To accomplish truly ubiquitous digital learning, students must be able to connect beyond the school walls. This can be achieved through a combination of mobile broadband, community connectivity, and home broadband access.

Device Perspectives

A true digital textbook is an interactive set of learning content and tools accessed via a laptop, tablet, or other advanced device. Perspectives of key users should be considered: in particular, students, teachers, and parents.

So now we now also have a federal push to digital texts, with the goal of students using electronic textbooks by 2015. One of the big pluses that I see in the switch to digital textbooks is that this could be the first real technology integration that ends up costing less money by integrating technology than by not. With the number of school systems, state organizations, and private foundations out there creating public domain textbooks, it can be a real cost savings to add a single technology device for a student to use to access all their textbooks (hopefully that can all be gotten for free).

Get the playbook at: http://transition.fcc.gov/files/Digital_Textbook_Playbook.pdf

Comments

Auto Summarization

In dealing with textbooks and students with disabilities, one of the most common things that we would do is to get the textbook in a digital format, as an ebook. By doing this we were able to use a number of tools based on the need of the student. I've had students who could not lift their physical printed textbook, but would be able to access though a laptop installed in their electronic wheelchair, for students with vision issues we could boost the font size or use a text-to-speech tool to have the book read aloud to them. One tool that I used with a number of my students who had issues was the Auto Summarize tool in Word. The tool works well with textbook, but wouldn't work for other texts, such as novels. I used this to reduce the amount of text that they had to read, the "cognitive load" of the text, but would still enable be able to get the information. Word did a great job, and depending on the student I would reduce the text to about 66% for facts and support...

Ebooks as Textbooks - Part 2 - Highlighting

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Textbooks usually have a structure, and it doesn't matter if it is an electronic textbook or a paper printed one, the people who put the textbook together usually make it have a structure to help you better understand what you are reading and learning. Textbooks are usually a type of text known as informational or expository text - this is text written to inform, and can be things like textbook chapters, newspaper and magazine articles, and other reference materials like encyclopedia items. The other kind of text that you usually encounter in school is narrative text, where a story is being told - which could be fictional or non-fiction. And while textbooks are informational text, many will also have narrative text, usually as stories to help you better understand the concept, although in an English or literature class the stories are often more the focus of the learning. Textbook Elements With an electronic textbook it might be hard to see the structure, because you cant riffle...

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