How Can eBooks Help Schools Now
Digital textbooks offer schools a number of advantages – especially when they want to stay flexible for on campus, remote or hybrid schedules.
We had the pleasure of interviewing Anne Kellerman, Tech Solutions Engineer at Blackbaud, via Zoom and learning about what matters to her as an educator and also as an advisor to schools about Blackbaud products.
“It’s not realistic to assume that a teacher or a student could go an entire year, especially when you think about the fact that they’re starting all new subjects or all new levels of subjects in the coming year, I think the textbook piece is going to come into play.”
“Personally from having taught classes all the years I was at Boys Latin…the textbook actually plays into the delivery of course content, delivery of curriculum, I feel, more in the first half of the school year than it does in the latter half because you’re building whole new skill sets. You’ll have students who have never taken that subject before. There is a lot of just basic skill-building and knowledge building that occurs in that beginning piece and the textbook does a really good job of that.”
Damage to physical textbooks, dated textbooks, returned textbooks, enrollment uncertainties and drops/adds to sessions are all a lot easier with digital distribution.
“I think they immediately address the no-touch environment that we’re all hoping to have. So there’s not a physical textbook to distribute to a student. No physical textbook to collect back. Or even for any intermediary – a teacher doesn’t have to touch it, the student doesn’t have to touch it. And just from that logistics standpoint, the book doesn’t get stuck in a locker over a period of time where the student isn’t allowed to come into the school building,” Anne said.
For Anne, it’s about making this all easier for schools. “So I think it addresses that need, it addresses the need for the flexibility, for the kind of anywhere anytime access,” she continued. “And I think the more we can introduce this to teachers and have them understand how in addition to being able to curate content in our Topics area of the Class pages, for them to be able to curate content right into a textbook is…another way in which they can structure their content and their course.”
We really appreciated the time Anne spent talking to us about her experiences and her expertise.
Register for the 2020 Blackbaud K–12 Virtual User Conference, July 8-9. FREE for teachers, with sessions, speakers and insights on how schools are staying flexible for on campus, remote and hybrid approaches for fall.