27 March: Breakout session (1)

Free at Last: Learning Beyond Textbooks by Matt Federoff
(Attended: Kwai Yin)

Matt Federoff spoke about the journey of Vail, moving into the non-print state.
  • Revolution: The challenge is to find the content for every subject. The benefit of riding the online content is that, it offers every delivery modality, that is imaginable to match any teaching style.
  • Metaphor of textbook: Totally out of context - California Open Source Textbook (http://www.opensourcetext.org/) [Quote: "COSTP's mandate does not replace printed textbooks; it simply makes them less expensive to produce; and, in doing so creates many additional benefits, economies, and efficiencies that will fully leverage California's activities in the K-12 textbook publishing domain."]
  • The search in the internet (e.g. via Google): It is chunk content in bits and pieces; unlimited creativity; aggregated effort harvesting enthusiasm.
  • Content is out there: Web-delivered content; downloadable content; teacher-created content; Prenium (Paid) content - Locate it > Aggregate it > Sort it > Serve it
  • Serve it in the way it matches instructional goals, is "just in time" and enables teachers to add value back (This marks the difference of having a digitalised copy of textbook and learning with Digital Content)
  • OLD Iron rule of Lesson Planning: "You teach with the stuff you have, and the stuff you have determines what you teach" - i.e. using the content we have
  • The NEW way is to use goal to select digital content to meet the instructional goals
  • NEW Rule: "You teach the stuff you have, and now you have unlimited stuff"
  • The approach adopted by Vail School District

http://beyondtextbooks.org/

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