beyond the textbook
My twitter stream has been filled most of the morning with the hashtag #beyondthetextbook and it has been an interesting conversation. I thought while I was thinking about it I would write a couple of short notes about the conversation. #1. I am all for losing the traditional textbook. As it stands now, most of my classes don't use the textbook very often. I don't think that US History has used their text at all this year. World History has done some work out of their book here and there. AP US has nightly reading assignments from their book but I could just as easily give them readings from somewhere else. But there are problems. Internet access is absolutely critical to losing the text. In the classes that I teach that use the computer lab, I almost never refer to the book. But in the classes without access, the students use their book more. It would either be a text of some kind or internet access. If I ran off all the things that I wanted my students to read then