by School CIO
In the last hundred years students have gone from attending one-room schoolhouses with handheld slates, to classrooms with handheld devices of a more high-tech sort. Yet, one thing hasn’t changed — the use of expensive and, in many cases, outdated textbooks as their main source of content. The Internet has made it possible for teachers and experts to share a wide variety of open educational resources (OER), but organizing, managing and delivering this content has been an arduous, time-consuming challenge. Now that may be changing. Net Texts is a free, web-based system that provides teachers access to a library of OER content, which they can then combine with their own resources to create and publish lessons directly to students’ iPads, Android tablets, or computers. Schools can save up to $250 per student per year by reducing or eliminating costs for textbooks and curriculum materials. “Our teachers are delivering content in ways our students find interesting and engaging, and outside the classroom it’s really no different than if they took their teacher home with them. It is simply amazing,” said Patty Childs, principal of St. Jude the Apostle, one of the Atlanta schools that piloted the system in 2011 as part of a Diocesan 1:1 iPad initiative for eighth grade students.
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