Beyond a Single Textbook

Question: How can students move beyond the single textbook to explore the many other resources available to them?

Answer/Quote: “With the rise of the digital age, if there is one artifact of our classrooms that needs rethinking, it is the textbook. No longer can teachers rely on a single source of information to meet our curricular needs. With many states subscribing to adoption models, the textbooks stay around too long and their content is frequently outdated.”

Quote:” For this reason, strategy guides can be useful vehicles for bridging textbook content and the myriad of information available to us via digital sources. Strategy guides are not the study guides of yesterday—essentially a series of question students had to answer while reading a textbook chapter. With the increasing need to develop strategic readers and writers, strategy guides…take students outside of a chapter and into multiple sources of information, touring virtual worlds, blogging about issues and synthesizing information from websites, online encyclopedias and so forth.” P. 248.

Comment: Makes sense. RayS.

 Title: “Real-Time Teaching: Bridging Print Literacies and Digital Literacies Using Strategy Guides.” KD Wood. Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy (November 2011), 248-252.