With technology being embraced in classrooms all over the world, students are gaining accessing to endless supplies of educational materials ranging from e-textbooks to digital fiction and non-fiction books. I’ve utilized MyOn (www.myon.com), a website that provides an unlimited amount of digital books to students and expands your classroom library. This program monitors and tracks their growth and provides additional literacy tools to supplement their learning. With digital books gaining popularity, e-textbooks are the tools of the future. There are many benefits to e-textbooks versus the traditional hardcopy, a book that no longer grabs the attention of today’s learners. With students moving towards a digital future, many schools are integrating individual laptops or ipads for student use to access online material. According to The New York Times article, In a Digital Future, Textbooks are History; like so many others, a high school branched out into the digital world of learning by providing students with computers to complete classwork, homework, and preview class content in the form of podcasts. With technology integrated into the classroom, students are learning the same material but in a different way, a way that keeps their interest in a technological savvy environment. In order to move to a fully digital classroom, the question arises, are schools able to afford the quantity of laptops, ipads, kindles, etc. that will be needed to incorporate digital books into the classroom? This is a valid concern and one that is often thought about and discussed. As an educational leader is it crucial to determine whether the benefits outweigh the negatives. With incorporating e-textbooks into the already established curriculum and with the technology in place, schools are able to provide this resource on demand. As teachers, we are often faced with a shortage of textbooks with reasons ranging from new students, lost textbooks, etc. When the need for new textbook surface, an e-text can simply be purchased without the wait time of delivery. With this environmentally friendly resource, e-text often incorporate links to online websites such as YouTube or other multi-media resources to contribute to an unlimited supply of knowledge. Digital e-textbooks also provide text-to-speech functions that support struggling readers, readers with dyslexia, or the visually impaired. The number of teachers using technology in their classroom is growing at an exponential rate. The percentage of K-12 classrooms with Internet access has increased from 51% in 1998 to 98% in 2012.
In this video, you will learn about how digital textbooks influence student learning in the classroom. http://bcove.me/06btxqq6
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