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As a Mathematics teacher I should be addicted to textbooks - aren’t all Maths teachers?

Recently at my school we were heading done the path of tablet PCs for students, during which I approached all Heads of Department to reduce the required textbook list, to initially provide an offset for parents but it also promoted some very interesting discussion about the role that a textbook plays in student learning in particular subjects, the result being the Year 7 booklist was reduced from ~$850 to ~$250.  However the tablet programme was put on hold indefinitly mid-way through the year (for a variety of reasons), and the booklist was revived for many subjects despite the pedagogical discussion that eliminated them previously.  Why? We still have a Moodle based student intrante that would allow delivery of e-content and approximately 1:3 computer to student ratio.

The Mathematics Department have kept the current text, mostly because of the “time” required to develop resources to suplement the textbook questions. However I often wonder whether students, despite our explict teaching, know or want to use the text for anything other than ‘the odd numbered exercises”. My students have takent to posting in our online help forum queries and/or googling key concepts and sharing with their friends via MySpace or IM rather than look in their book.  In fact one student asked whether I could scan the relevant pages and place on the Intranet so she wouldn’t have to take the book home Science has removed all text books - we didn’t really use them much, and in fact felt compelled to set more ‘comprehension’ questions from the text.

Does Geography need an atlas? Of course - I always had one, they need to be able use an atlas.  I am confident that any student if given a choice would prefer to use the Web to find information - thats what I do!  Besides as soon as an atlas is published it is out of date, I hated the times when I was in primary school where we were forced to relabel African countries that had changed thier name due to war.

Of course English still requires books - the set novels. Well probably yes, we don’t have the Kindle in Australia and the majority of teen novels are not available as ebooks….yet.

Interestingly the strongest debate I had with any department, that was unresolved is one in which the textbook has been removed for pure pedagogical reasons.

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Hope you all enjoy the next installments - one of my fellow staff members had to leave his office the other day because the person he was sharing with wasy playing my vodcasts!