I would like to add only a link to a public organization that is working on the problem. Have a look here https://www.fondazionelia.org/en/
In Praise of Open Source Textbooks
91–100 of 106 posts
Re: In Praise of Open Source Textbooks
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
> funds aren't made specifically available for purchase of lesson plans You mean no teachers set up a github repository where they give away lesson plans just to be helpful? Teachers are unable to pool their resources and help each other? "Hey Mr Hand, I'm teaching science for the first time next year. Can I use your lesson plans?" "Sure, Ms Halsey!" Besides, teachers complain a lot about spending all their time devi…
Simply googling would answer many of your questions in thirty seconds. For example, search for by lesson plans and you’ll discover there are many marketplaces for lesson plans. People unfamiliar with problems frequently think they are easy, because they fail to understand the complexity of the problem. A similar question might be “why would you invent a new programming language, when you could just use an existing on…
> People unfamiliar with problems frequently think they are easy, because they fail to understand the complexity of the problem.
Please illuminate how 3.7 million teachers need to spend their summer drawing up a new set of lesson plans every year.
> A similar question might be “why would you invent a new programming language, when you could just use an existing one?”
Great question. Because I want to. I'm not complaining about it demanding sympathy because I lose my summers working on it.
I have no problem with teachers who want to create their own lesson plans, rather than using existing ones. I'm just not buying the complaining about what a burden it is to reinvent the wheel, when they can use last year's, or a fellow teacher's, or buy one off the internet.
Re: In Praise of Open Source Textbooks
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
> funds aren't made specifically available for purchase of lesson plans You mean no teachers set up a github repository where they give away lesson plans just to be helpful? Teachers are unable to pool their resources and help each other? "Hey Mr Hand, I'm teaching science for the first time next year. Can I use your lesson plans?" "Sure, Ms Halsey!" Besides, teachers complain a lot about spending all their time devi…
Simply googling would answer many of your questions in thirty seconds. For example, search for by lesson plans and you’ll discover there are many marketplaces for lesson plans. People unfamiliar with problems frequently think they are easy, because they fail to understand the complexity of the problem. A similar question might be “why would you invent a new programming language, when you could just use an existing on…
> A similar question might be “why would you invent a new programming language, when you could just use an existing one?”
I feel like this is a bad analogy if you are trying to support the idea that teachers need to make their own lesson plans. Could you imagine if every programmer had to build their own programming language before using it create software? Nothing would ever get done.
Instead, the vast majority of programmers just use one of the many existing programming languages.
Re: In Praise of Open Source Textbooks
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
Let's see. Science? Nope. History? Nope. Exercise? Nope. Reading? Nope. Writing? Nope. Foreign languages? Nope. Current events? Yup. Just bring a newspaper to class.
I have a bunch of EM textbooks from the 40s and 50s on my bookshelves, the field has changed quite a lot i.e. I understand what they are saying, but the mathematical formalism is very obtuse and the applications are often irrelevant outside of the very basics. The Feynman lectures were recorded prior to the standard model for example, still excellent but hopelessly out of date as an introduction to undergraduate phys…
> A certain percent of everything is crap, textbooks are no different.
When it comes to classic literature, if you randomly choose a book that is still around after 100 years and randomly choose a book that was written in the last 5 years, odds are the older book will be a better book.
Re: In Praise of Open Source Textbooks
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
Curriculum change is relatively frequent in some places. Different classes take to different material at different paces. Different resources are available to different schools and different classrooms (think science experiments). In the UK there are online platforms for purchasing and selling lesson plans. My partner has saved much time purchasing lesson plans from these platforms. They are available. Teachers aren'…
> funds aren't made specifically available for purchase of lesson plans You mean no teachers set up a github repository where they give away lesson plans just to be helpful? Teachers are unable to pool their resources and help each other? "Hey Mr Hand, I'm teaching science for the first time next year. Can I use your lesson plans?" "Sure, Ms Halsey!" Besides, teachers complain a lot about spending all their time devi…
> You mean no teachers set up a github repository where they give away lesson plans just to be helpful
Your sample set of teachers is very different than mine if they can figure out how to do something technical like that.
Re: In Praise of Open Source Textbooks
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
The teachers I know do reuse their lesson plans when they teach the same class. One of the biggest values of seniority is being able to teach the same class every year. Why they don't standardize has everything to do with the kind of people who become teachers and what they want to be doing with their time.
> The teachers I know do reuse their lesson plans when they teach the same class. Of course they do. I knew I was being buffaloed. Though the point stands that why don't they share lesson plans? Why do we need 3.7 million unique lesson plans? There ought to be plenty of off-the-shelf plans to use.
Obviously they do, here's one popular example from the national teachers union: https://sharemylesson.com/about-us
And of course teachers within any school will generally share whatever they can.
Re: In Praise of Open Source Textbooks
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
Or perhaps every classroom is filled with unique individuals with differing learning needs?
How can they develop unique lesson plans the summer before they know which students they get?
Talk to teachers from the grade below, think about what hasn't worked well in your class the last few years, think about how your school district might differ from that of the lesson plan you're modifying.
For example, maybe you need to modify some take home science experiments because your kids tend not to have easy access to the right materials. Or, maybe the elementary school math program is more advanced than average, so as a middle school teacher you need to modify any standard lesson plan so you're not repeating material the kids already know. Or, maybe as a Spanish teacher you need to figure out how to effectively deal with a class where usually half the kids are children of immigrants and already close to fluent. Or, maybe as a history teacher you have an assignment the kids used to love where they make a Facebook profile of a historical figure, but now most kids aren't using Facebook anymore and the assignment isn't really engaging them. Or, maybe your town has some historical sites that you'd like to make field trips to, so you want to add some lessons to give some specific context around them. Or, maybe as a P.E. teacher the gym is being renovated and you're gonna have to work around that. Or, maybe a local private school just closed and you're expecting to get a bunch of its students in your class next year. Or, maybe a lot of your kids can't afford TI-84s but the school FINALLY got funding to purchase enough for the whole class. etc. etc. etc.
Re: In Praise of Open Source Textbooks
#98> thank you, thank you You are very welcome. Glad to help. :-) (I'll just say that the TeX Users Group is very interested in improving the PDFs that LaTeX outputs in this regard, and has projects in this direction. They are at https://www.tug.org .)
Could you elaborate on this? Like a link to a concrete project/discussion? I am visually impaired too and I did my own research on this topic a while ago. It appears that in the past decade or two there have been a few attempts to improve accessibility of Latex generated PDFs, but none of them seems to have accomplished the goal and pretty much all of them are dead projects now. I would be happy if there's an ongoing…
There is a working group. See https://www.tug.org/twg/accessibility/. One of the reasons to have a TeX Users Group is to allow there to be a way to organize, and provide some money for, such things.
(I should say that my personal involvment goes no further attending presentations at the annual conference.)
Re: In Praise of Open Source Textbooks
#99> thank you, thank you You are very welcome. Glad to help. :-) (I'll just say that the TeX Users Group is very interested in improving the PDFs that LaTeX outputs in this regard, and has projects in this direction. They are at https://www.tug.org .)
> interested in improving the PDFs that LaTeX outputs in this regard, and has projects in this direction Can you elaborate on what / where those projects are? It's not clear from the tug.org website. I love LaTeX and if I had a relevant skill set I'd be willing to help out. Thank you.
See https://www.tug.org/twg/accessibility/; I'm afraid I can't say more than that.
Re: In Praise of Open Source Textbooks
#100Could a equation OCR system like [1] be combined with a screen reader? It seems to support asciimath [1]: https://mathpix.com/ocr
this looks interesting, and I think would be perfect for the kind of stuff I deal with. Unfortunately, the pricing looks less interesting (about $100 for a 1000 page pdf, if I'm reading it right, although possibly I could attempt to break the pdf up into pages which have the math). There was an older solution for this which costs about $200 as a whole. Stuff like this exists, and is possibly pretty reasonable monetar…
There is an option for 5000 snips per month for $5. If you annotate the pdf every time you convert to latex, it should be much cheaper