Session 4-eBooks--CK12

In Session 3's 'Readings' in the syllabus, I had you read a little about CK-12. (Based upon a comment from one of you last session, you can get carried away exploring its resources.) They currently have mostly STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) subject material, but have now begun adding Humanities as well.

There are a few of you taking this course that teach in the latter subject areas, but if CK-12's model holds true, then they will have textbooks and workbooks in your disciplines w/i the next year or two.

Now you won't be taking this course in a year or two, so I'd like you to spend some time this week poring through CK-12's resources and practicing with the interface, so when that day comes you'll be the first one in your school to be using this great tool.

Let's start by watching this brief intro. video that my friend Neeru put together recently to introduce herself and CK-12.





Now, in case you didn't get a chance to do the readings from last week or need a refresher, give their, 'About Us' page a skim now.  When you've finished I'd like you to read the most recent news articles about them..

You should be pretty excited and inspired about the possibilities at this point.  I was when I first learned about them in 2008.  I reached out to Neeru to explore building a collaboration and she flew me out to Silicon Valley in November '08 to meet with her, and her co-founder, about their work. I was so enthralled that I decided to add their resources to this course to help share their vision, and also to help contribute to the movement myself.

Imagine if our entire state began to use open education resources (OER) to 'collectively' write our own textbooks and curriculum material, and then began sharing them with each other. Sounds beyond reach doesn't it? But some systems and State Dept.'s of Education are trying just that. Read about Virginia for example. (and that was six years ago!)  There's more about their plan here as well.

Now CK-12 just really began taking off around August of '08, so as I mentioned above, they don't have every discipline yet. But, like I said, they plan to broaden to other areas soon. Here's a brief demonstration to watch.  When you're done watch this one they had an intern pull together:

Introducing CK-12 Foundation's Digital Learning Tools - #2 from CK-12 Foundation on Vimeo.

Now if this all scares you a little or you feel a little intimidated---that's justified.  Some of you mentioned in your comments from the last session that you were apprehensive about 'publishing' your material until you reached a certain comfort level.  That's to be expected.

I'm sure that you have a lot of questions. The biggest concern I hear is about the quality of the information. We'll go into more detail about that in the next few sessions, but for now think about how many teachers stray from the textbooks in their classes and instead use quality, credible information that they have screened using their professional judgment.

Now think about how much information teachers have in their heads. If they took the time to write it out, and share it freely with the world, we would have a tremendously powerful tool.  I'd like you to spend the rest of your time trying to play with CK-12's Flexbooks. See if you can find one to use in your educational setting, and as I mentioned before, don't write it off so quickly b/c they don't have anything in your discipline or grade level just yet.  The practice today, will pay off tomorrow.

To be perfectly honest, most people just access and use these Flexbooks, rather than make changes to them to personalize things for their educational setting, but Id still like you too tutorials linked here.

So, for those of you that think you have topics w/i CK12's database, please begin to experiment and collate your flexbook.  Review the video tutorials a few times if you need to and remember, you can add additional content to these over time, perpetually improving upon your eTextbook.

For those of you that can't find content here, please focus your attention back on OER Commons (from Session 3) and begin to collate material, connect the content to CCSS, that you can use for your digital chapter or book. Keith and Jack, I'm hoping that you will contact each other and find some common ground to build a collaboration. Remember, your over arching goal for taking this course is to create a digital chapter, multiple chapters, or even an entire eTextbook to support your discipline.

Good luck and as always please feel free to contact me if you have any questions or concerns.

Past participants' comments:
Spring '13

Dave Fontaine

DaveFontaine1@gmail.com