Digital Directions - Winter 2013 - (Page 44)
44 >> www.digitaldirections.org
“
What we consider
as a
is
actually
right now, though
it might take a few
before the
rest of the
realizes it.
textbook
dead
years
world
”
—Jay McPhail
Director of
Instructional
Technology
Riverside School
District_California
says, and reconsider selling content as a
large e-textbook package. The idea of
offering a smaller learning object, or small
chunks of curriculum, is more relevant, and
digital content should give students the
ability to rearrange that content according
to their own learning styles, for example.
“The technology potential there is huge,
but the big publishers can’t stay alive the
way they’re structured now,” McPhail says.
‘Shaping Better Products’
Mary Jane Tappen, the deputy chancellor for
curriculum, instruction, and student services
for the Florida Department of Education, says
that as districts in her state transition to digital
curricula, schools want to pull the very best
content from multiple sources—some they
might buy, the rest might be free.
“We’re moving away from one book per
content area per grade per student,” she says.
With digital capabilities already in
development, Florida will be able to track
what pieces of content are the most
successful with students. Tools providing a
rating for pieces of digital content will be
visible on each teacher’s desktop, allowing
the teacher to sort the material by standard
and the best rating.
Tappen compares the process to that of the
online retailer Amazon, which allows
customers to rate and search products.
Tammy McGraw, the director of educational
technology for the Virginia Department of
Education, says one way for big textbook
publishers to figure out what K-12 educators
want and need is to work more closely with
teachers and administrators.
Several years ago, as iPads were just
starting to be used in schools, McGraw says,
she approached the major publishers and
asked them to think about how to deliver
textbooks through a browser. Some
publishers ended up partnering with the
Virginia department to convert their print
textbooks to apps, and both educators and
publishers learned a lot about what students
liked and didn’t, says McGraw, and about the
difficulties in digitizing print textbooks.
Students, for example, didn’t like to use the
browser on the iPad—they wanted the
textbook to be accessible using an app.
Students liked the interactive media and the
electronic note-taking and highlighting
features, and they loved to quiz themselves
and do assessments on the fly. Many of
those features ultimately became integrated
into the products offered by the publishers,
according to Tammy McGraw.
The process taught McGraw that textbook
publishers play an important role, even in an
age when a lot of digital curricula is free.
“Just because you have these tools that
allow you to technically produce [curricula]
doesn’t mean you do a great job putting it
together,” she says.
But educators need to play a role and realize
that each new technology development means
a change for publishers. “We expect that right
out of the gate they’re going to deliver
something perfect,” McGraw says. “We have to
do more to develop opportunities to give
feedback to publishers, and we need to
assume responsibilities for shaping better
products.” n
ILLUSTRATION: Giacomo Marchesi_for Digital Directions
says. “McGraw-Hill doesn’t think you should
throw out the way education has been done
and start from scratch.”
The company is not seeking to create a
learning-management platform or get into
the device business, Laster says. Instead,
McGraw-Hill will focus on developing its own
content, making it adaptive and personalized
for students, and putting more effort into
developing data dashboards to organize
information for teachers.
The company last year acquired Key
Curriculum, a math technology company based
in Emeryville, Calif., in an effort to invest more
heavily in the data that digital curricula can help
collect about how students learn. McGraw-Hill is
integrating its own digital offerings with those of
Key Curriculum, featuring math-visualization
software, data-analysis tools, and datavisualization applications.
Games and simulations will also play a larger
role in McGraw-Hill’s digital content, building
on the company’s current iBook textbooks,
which feature built-in assessment “probes” to
track student progress and help teachers
determine how a student should review or
move forward through the curriculum. New
products will also be able to track a student’s
time spent on tasks and have the ability to see
how a student moves through the learning
environment. The goal is to allow students to
take a variety of paths through digital curricula
based on their own learning styles.
Beyond those changes, McGraw-Hill is
partnering with learning-management-system
companies to provide content that aims to
ensure that learning taking place outside of
school through online learning is just as high
quality as face-to-face instruction.
Educators say they’re looking forward to
the more interactive, digital curricula and
technological approaches the big textbook
publishers are pursuing.
But they say the publishers need to
change their business models to better
meet the needs of K-12 schools.
“What we consider as a textbook is actually
dead right now, though it might take a few
years before the rest of the world realizes it,”
says Jay McPhail, the director of instructional
technology for the 44,000-student Riverside
school district in California.
Publishers need to stop thinking of the
majority of their offerings as proprietary, he
http://www.digitaldirections.org
Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Digital Directions - Winter 2013
Digital Directions - Winter 2013
Contents
Editor’s Note
DD Site Visit
Bits & Bytes
Digital Storytelling
Online Courses Turn on Gaming
Reading in the Age of Digital Devices
Movers & Shakers
State, Federal Leadership Seen as Key to Innovation
Open-Source Opportunities
BYOD Boundaries
E-Cloud Forecast
Digital Shift
Security
Digital Directions - Winter 2013
http://dd.edweek.org/nxtbooks/epe/dd_2013summer
http://dd.edweek.org/nxtbooks/epe/dd_2013winter
http://dd.edweek.org/nxtbooks/epe/dd_2012fall
http://dd.edweek.org/nxtbooks/epe/dd_2012springsummer
https://www.nxtbookmedia.com