eBook News

You go to school, you have classes and in those classes you will have others students, a teacher and and a textbook. That textbook, will usually selected by the school district for you use use (usually from a big publishing house), and will usually be a big book weighing quite a few pounds. That is the classic thought about textbooks, although they don't have to be like that.  don't have to be limited to a course, although if you are a teacher reading this you might now be thinking of building your own etextbook. A textbook , as defined by Google, is "a book used as a standard work for the study of a particular subject" (google 2013) and from that people usually think school. You can expand that definition to read that a textbook is that it is a book that you use to learn facts, strategies, and methods about a topic. So while you might create your own text book for a class,  think about how a repair guide or manual is actually a form of textbook to learn about a car, ...

I got a new version of Office during a computer reset in my office and went right to using it. It was going along fine, till I wanted to use the Executive Summary tool to analyze some text and couldn't find the tool. In checking online, indeed it is to no longer be included with Office. This to me is an accessibility issue in development. As an educator when I have a student with special needs one of the first things that I try to do is get the textbook being used in a digital format. With digital there are many things that can be done, such as varying the print size to using text-to-speech. One thing that I have often also done is to use the summary tool to create differentiated versions of the text, from the basic facts summary, to summary and detail, to the whole chapter. Being able to quickly get a summary of a chapter is a great learning tool. I've contacted Microsoft to ask why it was removed and to see if there will be some way to have it as an add-on, but as yet have o...