Category: Publishing

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The Inconvenient Truth About Textbooks

School-books I just went to the iTunes App Store, and in one impulsive click, downloaded Al Gore’s companion app to his book “Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis.”

It’s an immersive learning environment that begs the question – $4.99 iPad app or $49 textbook? 

Watch this promo video and you decide if the eBook has made the traditional textbook a relic. If you need some more numbers to help you make the decision -a quick search on textbook costs turned up this data from a 2005 report by the U.S. Government Accountability Office. “The average estimated cost of books and supplies for a first-time, full-time student at a four-year public institution was $898, or 26 percent of the cost of tuition and fees. At community colleges, the estimated cost of books and supplies was a whopping 72 percent of the cost of tuition and fees.” 

EBook or textbook – still trying to decide?  Don’t forget that future updates of the app could add more content or features – how about social networking?

Update: A hat tip to my friend Martin Edic at 24PageBooks who pointed out that Push Top Press (the folks who did the Gore’s book) plan to release a publishing platform for authors, publishers and artists to turn their books into interactive iPad or iPhone apps — no programming skills required. Imagine when students can make their own!

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Think All Journalism is Migrating to the Web? These Students Publish Hardcopy Newspaper

The-Fowl Or perhaps you think that high school students are unmotivated, unwilling to take on complex tasks and totally disinterested in anything that isn't digital?

Well these kids run counter to all these stereotypes and more.

Students at Bolder High School in Colorado are 3 issues into publishing their own "underground" newspaper. And they're producing "The Fowl" in old school manner – hard copy with hand drawn illustrations. No InDesign processing for them. As one of the student editors says – "People our age don't get heard that often, because we're not seen as that credible. But we have things to say that we're the only credible sources on."

As reported in the DailyCamera,

The eight-page February issue, adorned with a hand-drawn bird on the cover, includes an opinion piece on the real-life superhero movement, a rant about Valentine's Day, an ode to the Absolute Vinyl record store and a story about a new exhibit at the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art.

…The students lay out the pages by hand, make an initial copy at Kinkos and send it to a Denver printer to print 1,500 copies. They said the hours and hours it takes to produce the paper have been daunting, but worth it.
"It's just students writing for students, without any in-between man," said senior Tomas Hernando Kofman.

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Will iPad Replace the Textbook?

In these dark times of slashed school budgets, program cuts, and teacher layoffs it seems extravagant to even consider finding funds for student iPads. Nonetheless, Brad Colbow’s video tour of new magazine apps shows the iPad’s potential for merging purposeful art direction with meaningful academic content. 

Since I first posted this today, I added a sample of what it might look like using material from my homefront series of document-based questions. Add the ability for teacher- and student-created content with in-class social networking and you have education’s killer app. Plus I bet students wouldn’t forget to bring their “book” to class!  Download IPad-educational-app-demo (7MB pdf)

Ipad-ed-app-demo 

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87 Free Web 2.0 Projects For the K-12 Classroom

Web-2.0-projects Web 2.0 sites become more useful as the number of users grow. Fortunately for teachers, there's loads of free educational 2.0 applications that can be utilized in the classroom to help students research, collaborate and share what they've learned.

Hats off to British educator, Terry Freedman, who has solicited lessons from 94 teachers from around the world and edited them into a free downloadable book Download Amazing Web 2 Projects 2 online version  (2 MB pdf) Hint: If you're not following Terry on Twitter (as I do) here's his Twitter link. The book also includes Twitter links to all the creative contributors to the project.

The book is organized by grade level and has curated links to all the web resources utilized. Each project includes a teacher-friendly "how to" with benefits, challenges, management tips, sample screen shots / links and learning outcomes. Terry's project is a great example of how the internet can be harnessed to share and collaborate. Who knows, the projects might even inspire your students to collaborate with their peers on their own book!

BTW – If you are a big fan of Wordle, you might like to see another international teacher collaboration "Build Literacy Skills with Wordle".


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What Time Is It Now? Reflection on Literature and Life by Abraham Rothberg

Rothberg-fiction For the last 5 years I’ve been a print-on-demand publisher, producing ten books for a dear friend – Abraham Rothberg. His previous work was published by mainstream publishers and has been favorably reviewed in NY Times, Harper’s, Time Magazine, and Publishers Weekly. Unfortunately his previous work had gone out of print. So we decided to cut out the middle man and self publish.

Our latest book is “What Time Is It Now? Reflection on Literature and Life.” Preview / purchase the book  

The collection is a retrospective selection of essays, sharply observed and often humorous, that span almost half a century of reflections of modern life and literature, politics and personality. There is an essay analyzing the operations of British Secret Intelligence in the novels of John LeCarré, explorations of the conflicts between “superman” Social Darwinism and Socialism as portrayed in the works of Jack London. The collection contains a series of personal forays into the nature of modern marriage, of trying to “cultivate one’s own garden” in modern life, as well as how novelists have depicted the “flawed dream” of American politics. In addition, there are analyses of Gary Snyder’s poetry and their sources, Solzhenitsyn’s short stories and plays and their underlying morality, and the domestic turbulence of Arnold Wesker’s English dramas. Several essays also describe and dissect anti-Semitism in European life and literature, its roots and reverberations, and in one instance, in the works of T.S. Eliot.

In addition to five new essays, it features twenty-five previously published works including:
 “The Decline and Fall of George Smiley” ~  Southwest Review, Autumn, 1981.
 “Waiting for Wesker” ~ Antioch Review, Winter, 1964-65.
 “Solzhenitsyn’s Short Stories”  ~ Kansas Quarterly, Spring, 1967
 “Jack London: American Myth”  ~  Bantam Books, 1963.
 “The War in the Members: Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” ~ Bantam Books, 1967.
 “Styron’s Appointment in Sambuco”  ~  New Leader, July 4-11, 1960 

Read Abe’s latest reflection on his work “Fiction is a Lie that Tells the Truth“ 

And many thanks to my talented publishing assistant,  June Tyler who designed Abe’s latest two books.