Storify · Create social stories. Interactive flip books. Building Your Own Textbook. Textbooks are a multi-billion dollar industry -- an estimated $3.5 billion for the K-12 market alone. But the growing availability of digital content and open educational resources (OER) is giving schools the opportunity to bypass some of the traditional expenses of textbook purchasing. It's also giving teachers the opportunities to build their own textbooks. No doubt the move from print to digital content is shaking up the entire publishing industry.
But the opportunity to shake up and rethink textbooks seems particularly profound. You can also include in a digital textbook (or "course packet" or whatever we'd call this new collection of materials) just those resources that students are actually assigned to work through. Considering the Source This sort of flexibility to reuse and remix content is made possible through the open licensing of educational materials.
States and districts are increasingly turning to these sorts of open resources, particularly as budgets shrink. Apple Release ‘The textbook. Reinvented for iPad.’ Video. How to Create Your Own Textbook — With or Without Apple. By Dolores Gende Apple’s iBooks2 and authoring app has created big waves in education circles. But smart educators don’t necessarily need Apple’s slick devices and software to create their own books. How educators think of content curation in the classroom is enough to change their reliance on print textbooks. As the open education movement continues to grow and become an even more rich trove of resources, teachers can use the content to make their own interactive textbooks.
It might seem daunting, but the availability of quality materials online and the power of tapping into personal learning networks should make it easier. Here’s how to create a digital textbook and strategies for involving the students in its development in three steps. 1. Teachers can work with colleagues within their subject area departments and beyond the walls of the classroom to aggregate resources through social bookmarking. 2. One of the most user-friendly tools to post resources for your course is LiveBinders.