No textbooks are to be found in this honors biology class at Empire High School in Vail (Ariz.) School District.
Five-year-old Empire High School, a low-slung, seven-building complex in the foothills east of Tucson, has plenty of new technology, including a one-to-one laptop program for all 850 students and a completely wireless infrastructure powered in part by rooftop solar panels.
What it does not have are textbooks, a bold omission designed to focus on Arizona’s learning standards, tap the resourcefulness of the school’s teachers, and—according to educators here—fulfill the promise of the new digital environment.
It used to be that anyone who made it through the semester without cracking a textbook was supposed to be very brilliant or very lazy. But schools across the country—driven by concerns ranging from the financial to the pedagogical—are changing that stereotype, as they switch from conventional textbooks to electronic versions of the same or online creations of their own.
California, acting on a mandate this summer by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to save hundreds of millions of dollars on instructional materials, will offer free, downloadable science and math textbooks to schools around the state under what is called the Digital Textbook Initiative. Virginia is in the final stages of producing an online physics textbook. Even major educational publishers like Pearson are beginning to sell digital copies of their standard texts at a discount.
An Array of Digital Textbooks
The range of digital textbooks for K12 students is as great as the resourcefulness of those creating them. Here are a few of the efforts leading the way.
CK-12 Foundation (ck12.org) has created a tool for producing and distributing textbooks online and is at the forefront of an "open source" movement to issue K12 textbooks for free. Currently this nonprofit organization has more than a dozen titles, including six available through California's new Digital Textbook Initiative.
Schools such as Empire, part of the Vail (Ariz.) School District, are taking matters into their own hands, replacing traditional textbooks for all classes with a combination of computer-based, teacher-generated materials; online subscriptions; and links to free information and activities on the Web.
In Jeremy Gypton’s American government class, there’s no turning of pages when he tells the assembled seniors, “Take a look in Article II under ‘Powers and Responsibilities’ and find me a rationale for President Obama’s appointing all of these ‘czars.’”
Instead the students turn to their MacBook G4s, the only objects on their desks, and dig into the USConstitution.net Web site—just one of a large array of digital resources that have allowed them to leave textbook learning behind.
“I never really relied on textbooks that much anyway. They provide only the thinnest veneer of what we’re studying,” says Gypton, who steers his classes to the ABC-CLIO social studies database for the background and biographies of famous historical figures traditionally available in textbooks.
In another class, AP biology students take their cues from their teacher’s blog, which posts assignments, background materials, lecture outlines, and PowerPoint presentations. Today it also asks them, “Why can changing pH affect how well an enzyme works?” while linking them to an online enzyme activity lab to search for the answer. As required by the College Board, Empire does own a few copies of the AP textbook, but they’re kept on reserve in the school library.
Teacher-Driven Textbooks
Juniors and seniors at Bolton Digital High School in the Rapides Parish (La.) School Board are learning how to receive assignments, how to use Gaggle e-mail and learning how to turn in assignments with Turnitin.com
The idea for Empire’s “textbookless” curriculum took root six years ago during the school’s planning stages, which included visits to schools with one-to-one laptop programs. “We saw that kids were really engaged with these laptops, but we also saw that what was happening in classrooms was really separate from the classrooms,” says Vail Superintendent Calvin Baker, noting that having teachers create what amounted to online textbooks would more fully use the technology in which the district was investing. Instead of using laptops to perform corollary activities, such as conducting Web site searches or creating PowerPoint presentations, students now would access and work with an exclusively digital curriculum for all of their courses.
Baker also explains that instead of traversing the ever-expanding pages of textbooks aimed at the standards of multiple states, Empire teachers dig down to produce or find the digital materials that best match Arizona’s. “It challenges them to be on top of their game, to know the curriculum, and to work together,” says Empire High School Principal Matt Donaldson.
“Initially, teachers may view a digital curriculum as more work, but eventually it frees them up to be the best teachers they can be and to choose the best resources,” agrees Dan Morrison, the technology director for the Rapides Parish (La.) School Board, which eschewed textbooks when it opened the Bolton Digital High School three years ago. “It really is a change of paradigm.” Morrison is expanding the digital curriculum this year to include collaborative wikis and a subscription to VoiceThreads, which allows students and teachers to record their comments inside and outside of class.
Morrison presented the nuts and bolts of Bolton’s program to last summer’s participants at the National Educational Computing Conference in Washington, D.C., while over the past year, Vail launched its “Beyond Textbooks” initiative, which offers its digital classroom content and training to other Arizona districts. So far 12 districts have signed on, for a fee of $8 per student, which helps fund the new program.
"This is really driven from the top down, which is one of the fastest ways to make changes." -Brian Bridges, manager, Digital Textbook Initiative, California Learning Resource Network
