Tech Apps Textbook Adoption

We are in the process of selecting "textbooks" for Elementary Technology Applications in our school district. The adoption we choose will be used by our teachers for about the next ten years. After reviewing our choices I think and immortal word from candidate Dean sums my feelings up best: AAAAAAAAAAGGGGGGGGGGWWWWWWW!

The state should already be asking for its money back. Maybe they could cut a deal with the major players to combine their best parts to make one acceptable resource.

Thompson: Who wants to store and be responsible for another class set of textbooks in student desks? Do you really want to have to check them out and in? Maybe they could fill that empty space in your class bookshelf. Certainly the district and state are excited about a publisher ignoring the directive to produce and electronic tool that if adopted they will have to hire thugs to hall and find warehouse space for storage. In my view Thomson failed the Following Instructions part of the lesson. F - Did not do the assignment

Tom Snyder Productions: The Graph Club 2.0 is certainly a fine program but a Technology application curriculum it is not. F - Incomplete

Classroom Connect: My favorite after leaving the presentations. I like the project based concept for integration. I like the promise of tutorials for our core applications - Kidspiration, Kidpix, Word, Excel, and Net Treker. Their reputation for quality technology training seminars shows in that their concept is clearly the best thought out and presented of the offerings. Unfortunately, when you actually use their materials, the execution falls far short of the ideals they set for themselves.

• Keyboarding program is excellent. I wish we could use it with the other vendors.
• Workbooks are well laid out with good integration ideas.
• The hands on teacher book they can thumb through are a plus for integration. The many Full page testimonials - like on page 54 of the Kinder book is one example of how they resorted to filler to complete a resource that is light on resources.
• The online quizzes function well and are well written.
• The Core curriculum training lessons is a wonderful idea that fell flat in their implementation. They use two to four screens to display the steps to something with no practice or animation. I could get that from the help screens in word. All online text based. No animations and then practice. I was VERY disappointed.
• Ease of use by teachers I would subjectively say is So-so
  Automatic record keeping - little to none.
• They brag about thousands of web sites that are teacher tested. In the 5th grade Inventors Biography Lesson I did a search on Marie Curie (one of the ten inventors they recommended) and got nothing. I kept trying and eventually got a search to return results, but the four sites displayed had nothing to do with Marie Curie as an inventor. Students will rarely type a search strings perfectly. They need to find a better search tool for their thousands of sites or offer students the chance to click on names to begin a search.
• Their Tech Standards report showing what standards have been fulfilled by the lessons a teacher has assigned was good.
• Extension ideas for curriculum differentiation were a plus
• I tried to view the Kinder "Electronic Research Simulations and Interactions, Weather and Seasons" simulation but it was not up yet.

SRA TECH Knowledge: A well rounded program with annoying shortcomings
Good animation on the splash page. I like that all the resources are available on the splash page, allowing the teacher to direct the students to a specific area without having a lot of class-lessons setup. It also leaves students free to explore, rather than using the assigned lesson approach many others have adopted. Who has time to do all the assigning? For that matter, the demo showed us how some of the management functions are "supposed" to look, but I did not get a chance to experience how a teacher would enroll a new student in the middle of the year or how I would download and entire school set of names and scores or see how the data could be moved from one campus to another as students move around.

• Keyboarding - LAME - The demo's take way too long. They introduce a key, then have you watch while the computer types alas all alas all automatically for four full lines before it gives you a chance to practice the exact same lines. Then it finally moves on to a practice session. Really bad. I would not want our students doing this for the next ten years. Worse yet, it forces the kids into the habit of pressing the return key at the end of each and every line. That is NOT something we want to ingrain in our students. This is a horrible program and reason enough to drop this choice and I would vote no just on this unless the company agrees to send site licenses to quality keyboarding programs for both young and older children.
• Nothing was in lesson 88
• The online program crashed while I was moving around
• Is it me, or are the voices a little annoying - they must have scraped the bottom of the talent pool. The WWW character sounds like he is mumbling.
• The Boolean Search lesson demo's and then uses the exact same word - Boring. It will only finish searches if you type the Boolean term in all caps.
• The TAKS quizzes were a good example of online testing - showing SRA's background and our future as Teach - Test - Teach becomes further entrenched. Ten quizzes with ten questions each that score themselves is a good start for those looking for another benchmark type tool. I might complain about TAKS materials thrown in, but then this is the format our students will be seeing if we continue on this national education path.

Learning.com: Our district has been using this for several years so I did not do a specific review. Maybe it is our closeness to it, or maybe it really is just a bit too much of the same old thing for every time kids come to computers. They have the best simulations and internal feedback by far. It is too easy to keep the kids sitting at computers, just doing the simulations/lessons and then saying there, we have done our duty and taught technology. Rarely do I see teachers using Learning.com's integration activities. The activities were an afterthought - the last part produced by the company - and it shows up in the execution or lack of integration. I just want something more for our kids "computer" time.

One person with whom I agree stated, they wondered if our kids will get a little bored with the same format throughout elementary. Would it be good to adopt different resources so that students see other tools at different ages?

If SRA could get simulations like learning.com's, add a project based design from the start from classroom connect, and get classroom connect's keyboarding program, or Mavis Beacon, Kids Keys or another, we could probable end up with a resource worthy of the funds Texas will be investing. As it stands all fall seriously short.