Digital Textbooks

I’ve noticed how more and more textbooks are being offered in a digital format. As a student I think this is very opportunistic and attractive on many levels. It saves carrying heavy books around for one thing. Furthermore, it saves energy and the environment because physical materials are not involved. And one can still highlight and make notes in a digital textbook just like in a hard copy so there is no impediments to usage there. In my profession as an instructor, I receive choreography notes to teach specific programs, a couple of years the change was made from receiving physical notes to digital PDFs. And in the instructor training I completed this weekend, the manual for the training was an editable PDF. It is clearly a growing trend in my professional practice. Moreover, future generations are going to be more accustomed to reading off screens I think which will make this a more familiar and comfortable option. I personally find that reading off a tablet is faster. I think that making textbooks digital makes them more accessible and portable and makes learning more practical and cost effective

Over the past two years, I have found the real importance of having digital textbooks accessible to students. Last year I worked as the one and only instructional resource teacher in a small, k-12 school (~75 students). Approximately half of the students in the school had various learning challenges. Whether it be specific learning disorders, Autism, ADHD, etc. Introducing digital textbooks to students became a great tool, as they gained a lot of independence with the ability to have a textbook read to them. I was able to provide many students with their textbooks in alternate format, allowing them to complete courses without the need of assistance if they couldn't read the text. I have students in my class this year that cannot read, and providing them with a digital textbook lets them work as other students do when they are to read something in their textbook. While their confidence may be shaken because they know they cannot read like others, the digital textbook gives them independence so their confidence in their work improves. Some digital textbooks also allow students to further explore certain concepts, or allows students to try activities themselves. I find these texts to be essential in my everyday teaching.

As a math teacher, I am often frustrated with the lack of value that textbooks bring compared to their potential. Oftentimes students see them as little more than a source of questions, to the point that they sometimes forget (momentarily, at least) that they also provide additional examples and answers. The more interactive textbooks become, the more likely that students will actually use them as resources to aid in their understanding of the material that the questions in the textbook are challenging them with. Just the other day I was teaching a lesson on graphing, and the brand new textbook I was using made reference to a free graphing software website, showing instructions for students so they could create graphs using technology rather than by hand. In a digital form, the same textbook would, I imagine, have the ability to link students over to that software where they could attempt the task themselves. It could also have provided screencasts of the task being done, for those students needing extra guidance to complete the task.

Learning is fun and engaging when is active and filled with lots of experiences. When it comes to choosing technology tools to support learning, one needs to eschew materials that are simply didactic and opts instead for those that are interactive, problem-oriented, relevant to real-world issues, and that evoke student motivation. The level of interactions in digital textbooks is involving with technology innovation. This is very convenient for teaching strategies that foster active learning.