Many of us are not totally happy with the textbook we use for our content in our classroom. Many of are students are not happy with the textbooks either. Is there a solution to this age old dilemma? Absolutely. Create your own. Better yet, leverage the students to create a textbook that is meaningful to them. With the power of the Internet, there is a world of information available to our students with the click of a few buttons. If we can teach them how to curate that information into a meaningful manner, we have not only helped them with our class, but have also taught them a life skill.
Google apps for education allows students to easily create their own web pages, which can have multiple authors. Technically, all of your classes can collaborate on the same website, and possibly even collaborate with students from other schools. Using a website format, students can not only add text and images, but they can add videos and animations that help the content come to life. They can even record their own student created content which makes it even more meaningful. More importantly, you can allow the students' creativity to take over and explore additional topics within the content area that you do not have time to cover in class and add it to the site.
If you're interested in learning more about student created digital textbooks, read about Garth Holman's journey to help his students create an ever evolving online "textbook" for his history class.
Ditch that textbook's story about Garth Holman's student created digital textbook
View their online textbook
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