Here’s a radical proposal from Wesley Fryer at Infinite Thinking: A moratorium on text book purchases by schools.

The day of the paper-based textbook is over. The era of digital curriculum has dawned, and it is fiscally irresponsible for school district leaders to continue to purchase paper-based curriculum materials in light of the digital curriculum resources now available and continuing to become available via electronic means. Digital, web-based curriculum materials are vastly superior to static, analog/paper based curriculum materials for many reasons.

He goes on to say the future of learning is 1:1. Instead of using static instructional materials in a very expensive paper textbook the future demands that we use the dynamics of digital learning in an individualized education: not just as consumers but also as collaborators and contributors. The digital learning environment is collaborative. Kids have access to vast resources but can also produce and add their own material. Creativity becomes integral to the learning process.

As a homeschool mom I’ve avoided dull textbooks as much as possible and collected ‘living’ books a la Charlotte Mason. Learning and teaching this way has been a blast. Mr. Fryer is very careful and adamant to add that lots and lots and lots of good books are always necessary.

Homeschooling is 1:1 learning. How best should we add this digital aspect of learning? How can we best use Web 2.0 or wikis or YouTube or Google? It seems we are only limited by our creativity.

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