By Tim Mathew

Tech Liaison (TC, 1998)

You 're all breathing a sigh of relief, right? Across the state, school boards are voting to confirm your choice of the textbooks English teachers will use for the next six years. As you wait anxiously for those boxes of shiny new books to arrive, here's a hint -- no matter how anxious you are to trade that battered dog-eared teacher's edition for its pristine replacement, don't overlook those shiny little discs tucked in among the new stories to read and worksheets to evaluate and duplicate.

Those of you teaching outside of the English spectrum may already be used to the new tech toys that the textbook companies include to persuade you to part with the big money their texts generate. If you're getting new books this year, take some time to talk to these teachers to see what you may be missing. The last time English teachers got a chance to adopt textbooks in 1994, the Internet was relatively new, and many teachers were just getting used to incorporating word processing labs and the Net into an already crowded curriculum.

I've compiled a list of some of the most useful upgrades textbook companies are offering in their new adoptions. Take a look at your shipment when it arrives to see if you can take advantage of any of these new gadgets.

Digital Copies of text banks & ancillary materials-

How it was- You planned your unit and took some time to a check out the worksheets sent by the company and the test questions they generate. They had varying degrees of usefulness, but you always felt yourself thinking things like "OK, some of this is pretty good, but I want to integrate some questions over the I discussion we had in third period." You were left with the option of retyping the quiz/worksheet to integrate what happened in your I classroom or resorting to the slow, sloppy option of physically cutting and pasting their stuff with the things you created. It took forever and the results could appear awfully unprofessional.

How it can be- Since many companies are now providing most of these materials in digital format on a CD-ROM, it's easier to integrate your own material. Since many of the files can be opened in your favorite word processing programs, you can I control choices like font and presentation order in your classroom.

Etexts/Egrading-

How it was- If your last adoption had any recognition of the Internet as a powerful teaching tool, it was usually a list of helpful websites about generic things like author biographies. These were interesting, but they usually required teachers to generate their own materials to instruct students on how to get to the site and what to do once they got there.

How it can be- Many publishers are now maintaining their own websites specifically related to the works included in their texts. In many cases, students can access the text online in a form where hyperlinks will take them directly to a definition, interesting fact, or other related piece of information. The Internet allows much more than just a footnoted definition of a difficult word. Real-time movies, chats, and web links are just a click away.

Egrading is a new phenomenon that some companies are offering that allow students to submit their papers to a company-maintained web site that will check them for standard grammar errors (subject/verb agreement, passive construction, etc.) and provides a brief evaluation of the overall effectiveness of the work. Turnaround time? Think in terms of seconds. Now, the feedback students get will never approach the personal level that a you're able to provide through your own response and peer-editing exercises, but it can give students a chance to fix some of the errors that seem to eat up a substantial portion of your time, leaving you more chance to evaluate "fuzzy" areas, like content and tone, which a computer can't access. Having someone ( ok, something) else telling a students they're consistently using “'it's" when they mean "its" might help the lesson sink in, as well as giving a reasonable simulation of what their essays might receive from and ISTEP+ grader .

Don't overlook the potential this tool has to eliminate the I'm-not-good-at-grammar-so-I-don 't-have-my-students-write excuse from teachers in other subject areas. Plus, letting the computer ~rade a few essays might allow you to assign a few more, increasing the number of writing assignments without sentencing you to endless nights away from the family. Often students can access these sites on an individual basis from home or school, giving them a chance to revise and increasing their ownership.

Links to standards

How it was- Have you ever had an administrator ask (read require) you to show how your lessons related to ISTEP or school standards as part of an evaluation? My guess is this is a nearly universal requirement with the advent of P.L.221. If you were lucky, under the last adoption, your textbook company provided a thick packet of information showing how all of the selections in its anthology fulfilled these standards. If not, these "requests" require you to spend some time with your lesson plan in one hand and the standards in the other as you matched them up and typed them into your plan.

How it can be-Some companies are providing the ability to create digital lesson plans that make this alignment as simple as opening their lesson -planning software and selecting the materials you plan to use. For each activity, the linked standards are listed alongside, often with the approximate time the activity will take. The real power of this tool lies in its ability to customize these estimates to your own teaching experience. In many cases, if your own variation of the assignment takes longer, or incorporates more, or different standards, you can manually link them as well. Some programs allow you to enter your own local standards and automatically link similar activities for you.

This is a necessarily brief overview. Each company has its own variations. Before you dedicate ALL of your planning time to simply reading over the new selections in you anthology, set aside a little time to investigate these new tech toys. You might find it saving you a lot of time some late night in December.

Last updated 18 Dec 2003