This blog is designed as a resource for CURR 501, Media Literacy, Popular Culture and Education at Rhode Island College, summer 2014. The course is driven by the essential question: How is new media and digital culture produced and consumed in ways that help us understand ourselves and each other in the context of the current educational landscape?

Thursday, July 3, 2014

Flexbooks ... You CAN write your own textbook!

What can be done with it?
The term FlexBook rises from the fact that this is a flexible book.  More specifically, a flexible textbook.  If you are like me, you have never picked up a textbook and said to yourself "WOW!  This textbook is super perfect for my students in every conceivable way.  It is to their level, has plenty of practice type problems (that I like), the chapters are organized the sequence that I like to teach, there are awesome graphics that can be used to describe or explain stuff AND there are videos embedded right into the book!  I might squeal ... EEEEE"  What?  This has has never happened for you either?  Well, now it can.  With flexbooks you can find one of several texts that has been addequately written and peer reviewed by experts in your subject area, copy that text and then modify the bejesus out of it.  
You can:
  • Change the sequence of chapters
  • Delete chapters that you do not or will not use
  • Change the actual text so that it matches your students ability (I am thinking of my ELL people here)
  • Add images that you like
  • Add videos that you like
  • Basically, DO ANYTHING YOU WANT ... use the already complete textbook as a template to write your own. 
  • Then, make yourself the author (go ahead and plagiarize no one is looking) and share it with you students via a webpage or offline as a PDF

Ease of use rating:  
EASY!  I will simply say that this program appears to be so easy that it sickens me that I haven't already tried it out.


Click the image below to get started by watching a 10 minute webinar.




Affordances:
Price for teacher access:  FREE!
Price for student access:  FREE!
How many students can sign up per class:  NO LIMIT
It kind of goes on like this ... the FlexBook people are a not for profit organization that rocks in all kinds of ways.  I think that the only thing you have to be careful of is that images, etc. should be creative commons (cc).  Seriously, that was the only gig I could find.  If you want to try and find one here is the FAQ page.  Good Luck!

Get started making your own FlexBook by clicking here now!

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3 comments:

  1. UnknownJuly 3, 2014 at 7:19 AM

    Thank you for doing this. I'm thinkng of making a virtual textbook for my blended summer astronomy course. I'm going to look into flexbooks further!

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  2. UnknownJuly 3, 2014 at 8:15 AM

    This is such a great idea! I know you said it is easy to use, but how time consuming would you expect making a text would be? Would this be something you would complete over a longer period of time?

    Thanks for sharing!

    ReplyDelete
  3. UnknownJuly 5, 2014 at 2:25 PM

    Thanks for the tutorial. I am very interested in this and as I said in class, I will be trying this out for my project.
    Thanks for sharing
    Mary

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