Challenges come with every stage of moving to a digital textbook environment. But the video above shows how the state of Maine felt the results would overcome the challenges: "An Innovative Computer Initiative Gains Momemtum." Perhaps, as they say, it will restore the "sense of wonder" to education.
BEFORE
1. Textbooks: Which materials? Free state-provided or via textbook publisher negotiations.
2. Netbooks: Which device? Selecting a netbook brand and model, reader, or other device. One-to-one does not necessitate digital textbooks, but digital textbooks necessitate one-to-one.
3. Acquisition: Will students borrow, buy, or combination?
4. Software/Netware: View textbooks online or download?
5. Staff preparation: Who does this: professional or district? Longterm and shorterm prep is required in preparing a school staff for the enormous changes
4. Software/Netware: View textbooks online or download?
5. Staff preparation: Who does this: professional or district? Longterm and shorterm prep is required in preparing a school staff for the enormous changes
6. School culture: How to create buy-in? Many years of district and site technology preparations on many levels that initiate a culture of moving to a virtual environment
7. Personnel: How to recruit a team? Appointing key site personnel positions to help plan and then implement changes
8. Accountability: RUSD Procedure for checking out Electronic Learning Resources and or Internet Access to Students: (RUSD, Jay McPhail, Director K-12 Technology)
A. Students must have a signed Acceptable Use Policy on file. Students and Parents are responsible for replacement costs if the technology is lost, damaged or stolen. If this occurs it will be treated the same way we currently treat library books and textbooks.
B. Currently sites wanting to provide equipment or access must purchase the equipment and ensure that the equipment is checked out using the library media center Destiny software.
8. Accountability: RUSD Procedure for checking out Electronic Learning Resources and or Internet Access to Students: (RUSD, Jay McPhail, Director K-12 Technology)
A. Students must have a signed Acceptable Use Policy on file. Students and Parents are responsible for replacement costs if the technology is lost, damaged or stolen. If this occurs it will be treated the same way we currently treat library books and textbooks.
B. Currently sites wanting to provide equipment or access must purchase the equipment and ensure that the equipment is checked out using the library media center Destiny software.
DURING
1. Training: This includes initial School2Home staff training and ongoing site staff development. Teachers were required to come for three days of training prior to the normal reporting days for teachers at the beginning of the school year, and staff development continues as time allows at the weekly staff meetings.
2. Connectivity: This includes unanticipated needs for broadband expansion at site and district level. In the first days of school, it was discovered that all students in a classroom could not connect despite the installation of more access points throughout all wings of the school.
3. Maintaining effective instruction: During the time of intense learning curve, teachers are still mandated to a) follow the content-area pacing chart, b) keep up trimester testing scores, c) keep up with increased parent communication.
AFTER
4. "The Future of Digital Textbooks" conference session, Feb 2010
"In the K-12 market, digital textbooks have been making inroads into the classroom; a California initiative aims to replace many high school science and math texts with free, 'open source' digital versions, while the new Democratic Leadership Council has proposed a 'Kindle in Every Backpack.' While some may think of a digital textbook merely an electronic image of a paper product, others have employed the electronic format in broadening the spectrum of learning. This session examines the emerging future of digital textbooks, including open access; subscriptions; texts bundled with online study resources; innovative texts that include multimedia, simulation models, automated assessments; and business models that will allow publishers to survive and thrive in the future."
5. "In a Digital Future, Textbooks Are History," New York Times/Education
6. "Opening Up to Digital Textbooks," T-H-E Journal
"...This semester, paper textbooks have gone the way of the 8-track tape in favor of Kindle e-readers.
Loaded with all of the textbooks that each student needs for the upcoming school year, the e-readers are replacing traditional textbooks, save for the "classroom sets" that will be retained and used as needed."
1. Students: Netbook maintenance and repair is ENORMOUS! The two major damage issues are breaking the LCD screen and damaging the charger (AC Adapter). The major connectivity issue is students saying, "I can't get the Internet at home," even though Riverside is a free WiFi city and the school netbook program is suppported through partnership with SMART-Riverside, the Digital Inclusion program.
2. Parents: Be prepared for parent visitations and phone calls daily. This is good in the sense that it accomplishes the goal of increased communication between school and home.
3. Teachers: Depending on their learning curve and affective filter, teachers have varying amounts of netbook integration into lessons. This ranges from very little netbook use to every day-every period use by, for example, an 8th grade Language Arts teacher who has created a folder on his iPhone for all 175 students. Yesterday (October 8), he showed me 178 emails he must answer for just one day's lessons. Some students haven't caught on yet and are not passing the class, and some are sending multiple emails with Thinking Maps and assignments.
4. Netbook maintenance and repair: Depends on device ownership, but personnel MUST be in place as well as protocols for repair.
5. Connectivity! The site maxed out despite the district adding extra "Access Points" in all wings of the school. All students in even one classroom were not able to connect. Finally, we appealed to the district who negotiated an appliance called a "Controller." It handles the wireless routers. It controls how many machines hit each router and distributes each connection evenly through out the infrastructure. It cost the district about $40,000.
OPEN ACCESS
RUSD plans to provide open access for students bringing personal technology to school as a learning resource as well as for RUSD to provide access to technology (equipment and or Internet Access) to students who currently have neither. Procedure for allowing students to bring electronic learning resources to school and allowing access to RUSD student wireless internet:
1. Students must have a signed Acceptable Use Policy on file (The updated AUP is attached, you can also access the updated AUP at http://students.rusd.k12.ca.us/openaccess.htm) If a student requests access to or internet system they will be provided with a code granting access. That code can be obtained from the Library Media center and or they can contact my office directly.
2. It’s imperative that we all understand the concept of responsible use of technology and with that in mind any electronic device (laptops, Smart Phones, iPods etc) may be used as a learning resource in class when deemed appropriate by the classroom teacher. Unauthorized, inappropriate or irresponsible use of technology is addressed in the AUP and will be dealt with as a discipline problem. All students must understand that open access is a privilege and irresponsible use of that privilege may result in access being terminated. For more information on responsible use of technology and teaching students to be responsible digital citizens please go to http://students.rusd.k12.ca.us/openaccess.htm
(Jay McPhail, RUSD Director, K-12 Technology)
Williams Act
4. Netbook maintenance and repair: Depends on device ownership, but personnel MUST be in place as well as protocols for repair.
5. Connectivity! The site maxed out despite the district adding extra "Access Points" in all wings of the school. All students in even one classroom were not able to connect. Finally, we appealed to the district who negotiated an appliance called a "Controller." It handles the wireless routers. It controls how many machines hit each router and distributes each connection evenly through out the infrastructure. It cost the district about $40,000.
OPEN ACCESS
RUSD plans to provide open access for students bringing personal technology to school as a learning resource as well as for RUSD to provide access to technology (equipment and or Internet Access) to students who currently have neither. Procedure for allowing students to bring electronic learning resources to school and allowing access to RUSD student wireless internet:
1. Students must have a signed Acceptable Use Policy on file (The updated AUP is attached, you can also access the updated AUP at http://students.rusd.k12.ca.us/openaccess.htm) If a student requests access to or internet system they will be provided with a code granting access. That code can be obtained from the Library Media center and or they can contact my office directly.
2. It’s imperative that we all understand the concept of responsible use of technology and with that in mind any electronic device (laptops, Smart Phones, iPods etc) may be used as a learning resource in class when deemed appropriate by the classroom teacher. Unauthorized, inappropriate or irresponsible use of technology is addressed in the AUP and will be dealt with as a discipline problem. All students must understand that open access is a privilege and irresponsible use of that privilege may result in access being terminated. For more information on responsible use of technology and teaching students to be responsible digital citizens please go to http://students.rusd.k12.ca.us/openaccess.htm
(Jay McPhail, RUSD Director, K-12 Technology)
Williams Act
"There seems to be some misinformation circulating concerning [Riverside USD] policy and Williams when it comes to the Williams Act... Electronic access to digital textbooks either by downloading or demonstrating access to digital content is sufficient to meet the Williams act requirement. That access can be on district owned digital devices or on Student owned devices because of our open access policy. I've placed the Williams language link below but just wanted to clear that up as there seems to be confusion in this area. I directly worked with the Governors office and the Williams enforcement people at RCOE last year to clear this up. When they visit students need to hold up a textbook and or a device (regardless of who owns it as long as we are allowing open access) that has either the content on it or that can demonstrate access to it. Please let me know if you have any questions."
Jay McPhail
Director, K-12 Instructional Technology and Career Technical Education
Riverside Unified School District
Director, K-12 Instructional Technology and Career Technical Education
Riverside Unified School District
OTHER ONE-TO-ONE EXPERIENCES
1. Clovis USD, Fresno, CA
"Because parents pay for the laptops, required funding is greatly reduced. Philips believes this is what makes Clovis's one-to-one program sustainable. He has seen funding dry up in many of the other districts that attended the initial meetings in 1996. "It has to be a partnership in some kind of percentage with your parent community," he says."
2. K-12 Computing Blueprint: Your Resource for One-to-One Computing
3. One-to-one computing programs only as effective as their teachers
1. Clovis USD, Fresno, CA
"Because parents pay for the laptops, required funding is greatly reduced. Philips believes this is what makes Clovis's one-to-one program sustainable. He has seen funding dry up in many of the other districts that attended the initial meetings in 1996. "It has to be a partnership in some kind of percentage with your parent community," he says."
2. K-12 Computing Blueprint: Your Resource for One-to-One Computing
3. One-to-one computing programs only as effective as their teachers
"Bebell and Kay found that while the implementation and outcomes varied across all five schools and across the three program years, access to 1-to-1 computing led to measurable changes in teacher practices, student engagement and achievement, and students’ research skills. Specifically, seventh graders in the second year of the program showed statistically significant gains on state test scores in English and language arts after controlling for prior achievement."
"More than 4 out of 5 teachers surveyed reported that students are more engaged in their learning, more actively involved in their own learning, and produce better quality work."
"Concerns:
However, as an innovation in its experimental stage, the laptop project has inevitably caused some concerns. For example, 38.7% of parents thought that their children spent too much time on the laptops. 39.3% of the teachers believed that it had become harder for their students to concentrate in class after having the laptops because they were being distracted by the Internet, e-mail, games, music, and so on. Students were more optimistic about their ability to deal with laptop related problems. For example, most of the students (83.9%) did not agree that laptops posed distractions to them in class."
However, as an innovation in its experimental stage, the laptop project has inevitably caused some concerns. For example, 38.7% of parents thought that their children spent too much time on the laptops. 39.3% of the teachers believed that it had become harder for their students to concentrate in class after having the laptops because they were being distracted by the Internet, e-mail, games, music, and so on. Students were more optimistic about their ability to deal with laptop related problems. For example, most of the students (83.9%) did not agree that laptops posed distractions to them in class."
OTHER DIGITAL TEXTBOOK EXPERIENCES
1. "Digital Textbooks: 3 Reasons Students Aren’t Ready" Outskirts Press
1. "Digital Textbooks: 3 Reasons Students Aren’t Ready" Outskirts Press
"The benefits of digital textbooks are numerous: they’re potentially cheaper, they’re better for the environment (at least so long as you don’t continually need to upgrade your electronic book reader), they weigh less, they can be updated more easily, and they’re more easily searched. But for all that, a number of hurdles still exist."
2. "The time is now for digital textbooks" O'Reilly Radar
"Punctuated equilibrium is a theory that says that evolution isn't a straight line. Species remain the same for long periods of time, and then suddenly there's a burst of dramatic change.
"That's how I see digital textbooks. We're poised to see all the years -- if not decades -- of predictions and debate left behind. Change is here. It's driven by technology, by the arrival of ebooks and the digitization of print, and by a consensus among publishers and educators that the time is now. "3. "Textbooks’ Digital Future" Newsweek/Education
"There’s no such thing as a “used” e-book, and digital textbooks are the center of a whole ecosystem of services—such as homework-management systems and video-capture technology for recording lectures—that publishers hope will be profitable. “We’re becoming a software service company instead of a textbook company,” says Peter Davis, president of McGraw-Hill Education."
4. "The Future of Digital Textbooks" conference session, Feb 2010
"In the K-12 market, digital textbooks have been making inroads into the classroom; a California initiative aims to replace many high school science and math texts with free, 'open source' digital versions, while the new Democratic Leadership Council has proposed a 'Kindle in Every Backpack.' While some may think of a digital textbook merely an electronic image of a paper product, others have employed the electronic format in broadening the spectrum of learning. This session examines the emerging future of digital textbooks, including open access; subscriptions; texts bundled with online study resources; innovative texts that include multimedia, simulation models, automated assessments; and business models that will allow publishers to survive and thrive in the future."
5. "In a Digital Future, Textbooks Are History," New York Times/Education
"Textbooks have not gone the way of the scroll yet, but many educators say that it will not be long before they are replaced by digital versions — or supplanted altogether by lessons assembled from the wealth of free courseware, educational games, videos and projects on the Web.
“Kids are wired differently these days,” said Sheryl R. Abshire, chief technology officer for the Calcasieu Parish school system in Lake Charles, La. “They’re digitally nimble. They multitask, transpose and extrapolate. And they think of knowledge as infinite.
“They don’t engage with textbooks that are finite, linear and rote,” Dr. Abshire continued. “Teachers need digital resources to find those documents, those blogs, those wikis that get them beyond the plain vanilla curriculum in the textbooks.”6. "Opening Up to Digital Textbooks," T-H-E Journal
"...This semester, paper textbooks have gone the way of the 8-track tape in favor of Kindle e-readers.
Loaded with all of the textbooks that each student needs for the upcoming school year, the e-readers are replacing traditional textbooks, save for the "classroom sets" that will be retained and used as needed."
