Comments on: Beyond Textbooks – Andy Chlup Discusses Digital Learning Models

By: Tucson Teacher

Tucson Teacher — Sat, 28 Nov 2009 22:53:30 +0000

Many districts have adopted the Beyond Textbooks model from Vail School District.

By: Bobby

Bobby — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 18:41:40 +0000

Welcome to the 21st century. Not only are we doing business with social media, but now texbooks are becoming obsolete in favor of digital documents. Either we have to embrace the technology or get left behind. There are many advantages of digital texts, not excluding the fact that using digital is much cheaper than expensive textbooks. It is also easier to access and personalize the lessons on digital texts. However, there is somthing comforting about the process of publishing a textbook. How much labor was put into it. Will the quality of content suffer with the transition from text to digital? Only time will tell.

By: Andy Chlup

Andy Chlup — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 01:36:51 +0000

Hi Joseph,

We actually are sharing access to our site and resources with 11 other Arizona school districts at this point. We’ve built a consortium to help spread not only the resources and curricular work we’ve done, but the professional development and strategies that help us move our entire school district from good to excelling.

For the service and coordination of the technical resources, participating school districts pay a modest subscription fee via an intergovernmental agreement.

We are looking forward to helping more districts by either allowing them into the consortium or by setting up and hosting a digital framework, which mirrors our own.

Andy

By: Joseph Thibault

Joseph Thibault — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 05:29:25 +0000

I understand the draw to digital resources, and you clearly outlined how they’ll be integrated into the digital infrastructure that will organize and modularize the content for other teachers, but Andy never mentioned or talked about his plans to roll this out to other teachers and districts. Their legwork is the foundation for a great innovation in educational resources, but I’m left wondering how the method/platform created by Vail can be pushed out to other districts or if they should create their own…(which I think would be a shame).

Note, the website does a good job explaining how to do it, but I think there could be some great database of information shared as well…just think about all the links created for those curriculum calendars (that’s a helluvalota links that could be indexed and culled).

By: Aaron Fulkerson

Aaron Fulkerson — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 00:14:01 +0000

Good read. This is a topic I’m very passionate about too.

Thanks for mentioning DekiWiki; however, DekiWiki is a deprecated brand. It is just MindTouch these days.