1. Textbook publishers
2. Netbook provider
3. Internet provider
The following negotiations were made possible by Riverside Unified School District's Director of Technology, Jay McPhail, and his assistant, Tracy Arner.
TEXTBOOK publisher negotiations
Include the following issues and highlights:
- Blackboard login vets which textbooks are available to the student logging in.
- But some publishers are more restrictive or more open about which books are generally available. For example, when a high school student logs in to Blackboard, whether he/she also sees the middle school textbooks are publisher-driven.
- Various devices are being piloted for one-to-one including netbooks, iPads, etc.
- Only CLRN Open Source textbooks are available to the general public who visits the RUSD Web site and accesses digital textbooks thorugh the Virtual School/Blackboard link.
- ALL district-adopted textbooks are available to individuals, affiliated with RUSD, who have a RUSD password into Blackboard.
- This means any individual affiliated with RUSD who brings ANY device to school CAN have the PDF version of the Blackboard-based digital textbooks loaded onto their device.
NETBOOK provider negotiations
Include the following issues and highlights:
INTERNET service provider negotiations
Include the following issues and highlights:
Tuesday, October 19, 2010 3:27 PM
Subject: Digital Textbook Update
Hi Everyone,
I wanted to give you all an update as to where we are with our continuing digital textbook pilots. To date we have all of grades 7-8 digital textbooks and most of grades 9-12 digitally available within Blackboard. This includes our standard adopted books as well as the open source textbooks that we adopted last year. To get to them please go to http://rusd.blackboard.com and log in (if you have problems logging in please follow the directions on the main page or click the support tab to get information on who to call for help) Once you’ve logged in click on the Digital Textbook Tab at the top (If you don’t login you will only see the open source textbooks) then find the subject area tab and then select your textbook. Teachers can link these to their blackboard courses and or download them and students can download their textbooks as well onto any device either theirs or provided by RUSD. We continue to add resources and will begin moving to K-6 curriculum throughout this year. It’s important to know that all these resources can be accessed now so please share this with your colleagues and your parents and students.
In addition to these resources we are continuing our pilots using digital devices as well. Currently we have over 1500 different devices ranging from iPods, Intelligent Papers Devices, iPads and Netbooks that we are using at a variety of sites in grades 7-12. We also have about 600 iPods that are being used in a variety of ways in grades K-6 to access curriculum and curriculum resources. We are being contacted on a daily basis from publishers and vendors looking to extend these pilots, some with equipment and some without. One of the more interesting pilots has been with cK12 (http://ck12.org/) cK12 is an open source publisher who has designed a revolutionary “flexbook” which allows you as a teacher to “build” a textbook based on your pacing. We will have a cK12 Trainer in the district on Nov 16 (Tuesday) and Nov 17th (Wednesday) if you are interested in finding out more about this system and being trained in it let me know. I also need to know how many of you would be interested in using (or are already using) the digital textbooks in your class or classes. If you are interested in joining us as we move to digital learning please let me know. Unfortunately we have finite resources so it may or may not involve equipment. Please let me know if you have questions or concerns…
Thanks,
Jay McPhail
Director, K-12 Instructional Technology and Career Technical Education
Riverside Unified School District
(951) 788-7135 ext. 80307 (office)
(951) 778-5672 (Fax)
Late September 2010
Some information put out by Jay McPhail:
As you recall we asked for volunteers earlier in the year to pilot the use of digital textbooks. Currently there are approximately 25 teachers (at least one at every high school campus) that are incorporating the Science and Math digital resources that have been provided as a result of the Governors Digital Textbook Initiative. We have selected 5 of these teachers to pilot the use of an electronic device with one of their classes. Each student and the teacher in the selected class is provided an electronic device (The list of the teachers, sites and classrooms are below) capable of holding all of the digital textbook resources as well as any other teacher created resources or online resources. Our willingness to pilot these resources and devices has opened doors with our current publishers who have provided us with access to all of our existing adopted textbook resources in digital format. We are currently working to get these resources in one location on our blackboard system. To see what we have so far go to: http://digtext.rusd.blackboard.com All of the free resources we currently have are posted on that site and are available for download without having to login. In addition to the free resources we have added our current biology, earth science and calculus books to this web page, we will continue adding all k-12 adopted resources in digital format to this page. To access any of our paid adopted resources you will need to login (the login tab is at the top of the page) you can login as yourself (as long as you have a blackboard account and click on the digital textbooks tab at the top of the page) or login using rusdstudent as the username and student as the password. Please share this information with your students. Thank you to all of you who have cooperated in this process. I apologize to those of you who are currently volunteering who I have not been able to visit as I have been focusing on the five classes below as well as coordinating with the state, our publishers and others to gain access to additional resources.
In terms of next steps we will be holding a meeting with all of our existing publishers and state representatives in May to discuss what the future of textbooks may look like for RUSD and the rest of the state. Each publisher has agreed to attend and our hope is to push them to make their content available modularly so we can pick and choose which resource best meets the standard being taught. In this way we can pick and choose chapters or learning objects that best meet our needs from multiple publishers and in a sense build a ”super textbook” that can be delivered electronically to any electronic device. We are also exploring a federal grant in conjunction with Ck12 (http://www.ck12.org/flexr/) and Intelligent Papers (http://www.intelligentpapers.com/Intelligent_Papers/Home.html) that could potentially expand the use of digital textbooks across all of our high schools. The state of California has also opened up additional submissions for publishers in the History/Social Science curriculum and will make those resources available once they are vetted (http://gov.ca.gov/press-release/14279/)
The resources above are available to all RUSD staff, students and community members. Please let me know if you have questions or concerns.
Thanks,
Jay McPhail
