Mark's+Mental+Meandering

The aspects that I find absolutely necessary for an e-reader program to succeed are the following (But we should consider using a tool greater than an e-reader.): I. Faculty must experience the pragmatic beneficial uses of an e-reader and its supporting technology. II. Faculty must be willing to put much work into the front end of the transition-that is, find appropriate e-publications or digitized materials and a way to disseminate the information in a structured manner. III. There must be an integration of course management and textbook content (combining textbook and ways to perform assessments). IV. The Faculty must support the program and encourage the students and community to do so. V. The Administration must provide incentive to the Faculty for the great effort and extra work that a transition will cause. VI. The Administration must support the Faculty through relevant, one-on-one and continuous personal training, as well as contemporary hardware and software coupled with on-demand, customer friendly back-end support. VII. The Administration must support the devices with infrastructure, such as power, maintenance, etc. VIII. Family units must understand experientially educational benefits of e-readers. IX. Family units must buy into the process and support the School in the transition.

Action Plan (from[| edtechmagazine.com])
The Consor­tium for School ­Net­working has been interviewing curriculum and technology leaders around the country who share a vision for engaging, student-centered learning environments and are ­committed to collaborating regularly. These leaders agree that curriculum and technology educators need to develop a trusting relationship, and they recommend the following:
 * 1) Lay the groundwork by discussing why collaboration is important, and agree to honor the decisions made together.
 * 2) Identify and promote ways in which technology can support best educational practices and address students’ diverse needs.
 * 3) Create cross-functional teams.
 * 4) Once a joint vision is developed, go together into the schools to see what’s actually happening in the classroom.
 * 5) Build a supportive environment that encourages ongoing communication.
 * 6) Collaborate with all stakeholders to create a vision for how technology will support the district’s strategic goals for ­improved learning.
 * 7) Build trust by being transparent about decisions and how they are made.
 * 8) Take time to stop and listen to each other — and share each other’s calendars.
 * 9) Agree to be flexible; it’s impossible to say yes or no to everything proposed.
 * 10) Honor genuine differences and keep focused on your common purpose.

[|Learning to Change-Changing to Learn]
(taken from: []) media type="youtube" key="tahTKdEUAPk" height="360" width="640" >> Kids are very rich content developers today through their social networking sites. They're big communicators through email, instant messaging and text messaging. And yet all of those things are banned from their schools. >> It's about relationship. It's about community. It's about connectivity. It's about access. >> We've got a classroom system when we could have a community system. >> They will be doing work that calls on their artistic abilities; that calls on their abilities of synthesis; that calls on their abilities of understanding context; that calls on their abilities in working in teams; that calls on their abilities in some sense to be multidisciplinary, multilingual, multicultural. >> The coin of the realm will not to memorizing the facts that their gonna know for the rest of their lives. The coin of the realm will be do you know to find information, do you know how to validate it, do you know how to synthesize it, do you know how to leverage it, do you know how to communicate it, do you know how to collaborate with it, do you know how to problem-solve with it. That's the new 21st century set of literacies and it looks a lot different than the model that most of us were raised in. > Now we're looking at a whole different range of schools. We're looking at schools that are producing genius, collaborative, gregarious, brave children who care about stuff, like their culture ... Around the world, people are testing out the ingredients of what makes that work and those ingredients are being assembled into just some stunning recipes in different places. It's a very exciting time for learning. The death of education but, it's the dawn of learning and that makes me very happy.

Why reinvent the wheel? Clearwater High School goes Kindle: This is an article that was published online last year, June 2, 2010. The crux of the article is that Clearwater High School is going to do the full Kindle. Some of the comments are great, so be sure to check them out. [] The school should be contacted to find out how it went or is going.

This article has some great information and points of research where other schools have implemented programs. [] "'To help move teachers into 21st century practices (and cope with shrinking budgets), smart districts are working with textbook publishers and e-reader vendors to exploit the promises of digital books.' The article reads. Brantley is quick with numbers. He says that for 2,600 math books—the number of texts needed for grades nine through 12—the cost was going to be about $182,000. That’s $70 per book. The e-book edition for that same math book was about $15,000. The savings on that one text alone covered a large part of the expense of that first rollout of digital textbooks. The savings don’t stop there. An English textbook was priced at $163,673.05 for 2,475 books—about $66 per book. The digital version of the same volume was a fourth of the cost—$36,554.45."

@http://www.technologybitsbytesnibbles.info/archives/5587?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+technologybitsbytesnibbles%2FAZit+%28Technology+Bits%2C+Bytes+%26+Nibbles+from+Cyndi+Danner-Kuhn%29&utm_content=Google+Feedfetcher

[]

@http://www.saintschool.com/podium/default.aspx?t=121790

This is a great article that addresses many of our questions; plus it brings up some good questions of its own. [] For example, what is an ebook?

Traditional books do cost money and break down. Follow Florida's Lead: Why More States Should Switch to Digital Textbooks:

This article came out just last month. In it there are many arguments as to why e-books are a good idea. For example, the article states that textbooks that are purchased as an epub are only about $10 cheaper because most of the cost of producing the books is incurred not in printing but in the salaries of researchers and writers. It goes on to say, though, that there are many classical texts that now live in the public domain; therefore, those texts are simply downloaded at no cost. []

An important point in this article is that Florida law is requiring all schools to switch to e-textbooks by the 2015-16 school year. It should also be mentioned that Free Educational Resource sites. []

Benefits not too much talked about. One thing that is not considered much is the ability for kids to publish, just as I did this “paper”. The first article below, //Rethinking eReaders as Publishing Devices, Not Reading Devices//, which was written by a librarian, describes several ways and software, as well as some benefits of doing so. Here is a [|link to a wiki] that shows other benefits. []

Another benefit is that disparate information can be formulated into a cogent “book.” With some research, a teacher can draw from an almost limitless pool of resources to create a “book” for her specific class.

This site seems a bit young for high school, but I think we can see the potential in the site. @http://www.storylineonline.net/

This is an amazing site to find books in many languages and has too many links: @http://en.childrenslibrary.org/