eBook News

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 mu...

This month (actually starting on July 1) Florida's Digital Learning Now Act went into place. This act requires schol districts to establish virtual instruction options, authorizes blended learning courses, adds new requirements for Florida Virtual School, requires fill & part-time school district virtuaion instruction, and requires an online learning course for high school graduation. But what does this have to do with ebooks you might ask? As an online teacher, I feel it has a lot to do. Using ebooks for my online classes has made things a lot easier for myself and my students. I don't have issues of them ordering and how long it takes for it to arrive (my worst case was for a student who ended up out of country when the course started and if he had had to wait for the printed version, it would have taken over a month for it to get there - the course would have been half over by then). If the general instruction of a class is delivered e...