Our department is looking into writing our own digital textbook. Whenever we adopt a new textbook it seems like we rewrite it anyway. Why not write it ourselves. So we discussed the question: "What would you like to see in a digital textbook?" Please add to the list by giving a comment.
1. Levels of examples
2. Video examples
3. Video lessons
4. Assessment tool
5. Homework problems easily printable
6. Link for students to access SMARTBoard notes
7. Geogebra/sketchpad/fathom activities
8. Wikipedia like edits
9. Accessibility (all browsers, phones, etc)
10. Interactive Practice
11. Homework submission
12. Dynamic charts
13. Exploratory features
14. Tutorials
15. Plenty of practice problems
16. Online quizzes with built in mastery and explanation of correct answer
17. Test generator-choose questions by standards. Alternate questions
18. Students can highlight sections, annotate on-line, and drag and drop main ideas to make a study guide.
19. Targets generator with tutorial
20. Reference to Google tutorial topics
21. Aleks like account
22. Shows only the problems that the teacher wants to give.
23. Dynamic and up to date
24. Immediate feedback on practice
25. Printable Homework
26. Grades and inputs the scores into grade book
27. Interactive links
28. Dynamic Charts (up to date)
29. Easy to view on a Smartphone
30. Links to other help websites like Khan Academy
31. Lessons if they don’t understand a concept
32. Some type of self-assessment where they can see what their mistakes are
33. More practice problems at different levels of difficulty
34. Some sort of explanation or hint for practice problems that a student doesn’t know how to do
Please give some ideas that you have?
Accuracy and not a lot of distracting pictures.
ReplyDeleteI recall a Dan Meyer presentation in which he listed some guidelines for digital curriculum. One that stood out to me was "crowdsourcing." Students' responses to various math tasks are instantaneously gathered and displayed to all, leading to consensus-building and opening up points for discussion. Another neat idea was how he presented an initial round of prompts for estimating (e.g., "What do you think is the measure of this ____?"). After which students applied the target skill for the lesson. Finally, I also appreciated his use of video prompts in which the "answer" to a question was evident at the conclusion of the video, instead of being simply an answer written in the back of the textbook. How broadly this technique can be used I don't know, but it seemed like worthwhile advice.
ReplyDeleteI would want the curriculum to promote quantitative literacy. I don't just want students to understand how to compute a proportion, but also how to imagine a proportional situation. I don't just want them to know how to divide, but to be able to imagine what the quotient represents in a variety of contexts.
ReplyDeleteI would have to add to the crowdsourcing/wikipedia idea: have easy edits by the students, but show each student's edits clearly, distinguished from other edits. Then, as people found those edits helpful, they could click something to recommend it, and eventually those methods would be seen at the top of the edit list.
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