Noel Erskine, Technology Coordinator Norris Schools

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A way to eliminate textbook costs?

Tuesday, May 10, 2011

Can we get rid of textbooks and their associated costs in education? I know, this topic may open a can of worms for many in education, and especially for the text book and publishing companies!  As school districts adopt more 1-to-1 initiatives or BYOD (Bring your own device) initiatives, schools will need to provide more electronic resources for those devices.


Until the publishers and text-book companies come up with a reasonable price, as well as finding the best format and delivery mechanism .... we must look at developing our own materials.  


Here are just a couple resources to start with: 


The Khan Academy is a non-profit that is working on providing open-source distance learning curriculum. This institute provides user-paced lessons via hosted videos providing a free resource for students and teachers as well as supplemental exercises for the ck12.org flexbooks (mentioned below).


Currently high school level math and science digital textbooks are available through the CK12 non-profit organization and I envision that the more topics will be added over time. The interactive student and teacher edition FlexBooks content is vetted, reviewed, core standards-based and also customizable. These books can be customized (Flexed) to meet your needs.  Check out their site for more information: http://www.ck12.org/flexbook/

With these two resources alone, you would have a great start to customizing your math and science curriculum and optomizing it for the digital devices that are coming our way in education.

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