Indiana School Corporation Finds Better Textbook Solution in netTrekker
When the Indiana State Board of Education decided to grant a blanket waiver of textbook statutes in regard to social studies last year, it was music to Mike Jamerson's and Bill Jensen's ears.
The director of technology and director of secondary schools, respectively, of Bartholomew Consolidated School Corporation were in complete agreement with the board: traditional textbooks, as increasingly obsolete tools in a dynamically digital world, can't get the job done anymore.
Online curriculum resources, such as the education search engine netTrekker, can.
The "reality of education today": textbooks are "static" and "uninspiring"
"Social studies is such a dynamic science, and keep in mind that I'm an old social studies teacher," says Jensen, "and the information is growing at such an exponential rate, textbooks are static resources that just can't keep up. Secondly, the big states' standards are driving what's in the textbooks, which may not match up with Indiana's standards. Finally, textbooks are not very engaging. They're dry. They're not inspiring, which is a real problem. Our kids are used to living in a digital world and that's the reality of education today."
netTrekker provides lessons, video, audio and games from trusted sources
In fact, Bartholomew had a committee working on a conceptual framework for driving textbook adoption and already had been discussing the shortcomings of textbooks. When the news from the state broke, the answer became clear. The corporation chose online resources over textbooks and chose netTrekker to deliver them.
Voted the #1 educational search tool in K-12 schools, netTrekker's over 300,000 digital resources are reviewed by expert educators for safety, academic integrity and age appropriateness; are aligned with individual state standards; and are organized by grade and reading level. The lesson plans, videos, audio, images, learning games and manipulatives are engaging and are selected from trusted sources such as National Geographic, Smithsonian, NPR, the Library of Congress, NASA and more.
In addition to relying upon netTrekker to scrutinize and search rich online resources, the corporation will launch a social studies portal to serve as an access point for students and teachers and will also employ ExamView for assessment. Each class will retain a textbook the corporation already owns, but the emphasis will be the three-piece digital platform says Jamerson.
The State cracked the door, "we've broken it down and jumped through"
"The door was cracked open by the state board," says Jensen, "and we've broken it down and jumped through. Fortunately, we were ahead of the curve on this thanks to the foresight of the committee and high-tech experiences such as our New Tech high school. We've already had teachers in other subjects saying that textbooks can't accomplish their goals."
The conversion from textbooks to netTrekker for the 2009-2010 school year will affect 4500 social studies students from the seventh through twelfth grades and 36 teachers. All 5100 secondary students will have access to netTrekker, which is important says Jensen and Jamerson, particularly since they fully expect the state to offer textbook waivers for other subjects in coming years. Now that they have deployed netTrekker for their social studies classes, the corporation has a ready solution for the rest of their curriculum too.
No turning back
For Bartholomew Consolidated School Corporation, and education in general says Jamerson and Jensen, this is the direction things are going and there's no turning back.
Using netTrekker and other digital resources dovetails with the corporation's ambitions for a 1:1 student-to-computer ratio. It fits the guiding principles of the Universal Design for Learning (UDL) education model-multiple means of representation, engagement and expression-for making education accessible to all types of learners. And, finally, it simply reflects the realities of the 21st century.
In an increasingly complex, collaborative, technology-connected world in which young people are more at home with digital devices than they are with books and pads of paper, according to Jensen textbook companies must either adapt or die. "They won't look like what they do now. They just can't. It's not where our kids are."