What Is Beyond Textbooks?

For the next two days I’ll be at Discovery Education’s Beyond the Textbook forum. The purpose of the forum is to bring together a couple of dozen educators to discuss the next generation of textbooks or whatever is beyond textbooks. The forum is set to begin in just a few minutes from now. These are my thoughts heading into the forum. I’ll update these notes over the next couple of days.

When I hear “beyond textbooks” this is what I think of:

• Using augmented reality applications to enhance images and diagrams and make them interactive. 
• Embedding video and audio into digital textbooks. Granted, this can be done in webpages. 
• Building interactive, choose-own-adventure pages into digital textbooks. Including checks for understanding that provide students with immediate feedback before moving on to a new section of the textbook. 
• Providing a base digital textbook that teachers can quickly and easily customize the content of those textbooks to match their curricula.

What do you think of when you hear "beyond textbooks?"

Full disclosure: Discovery is paying my expenses for the trip and I am speaking at a Discovery Education event in Vermont this summer.