The Daily Standard
Story Archive
Coldwater sixth grade math teacher Connie May presents a page of her online textbook in her classroom at the middle school.
COLDWATER - Gone are the days of clunky, hardback textbooks.
Some Coldwater Middle School math teachers have been crafting their own textbooks online to customize classwork and increase the accessibility of classroom materials.
Sixth grade math teacher Connie May said she hasn't used a traditional textbook in nearly 20 years.
"The problem is, you get a textbook and it's never going to be perfect," she said.
For the past two summers, May has taken textbook-writing courses with Dominican Online to create her own class materials.
May said the district got involved in the courses in an effort to be more consistent across classrooms with curriculum.
"You want to keep things and kids doing kind of the same and so we tried to be very consistent in what we were teaching and how we were teaching it," she said. "Just to keep the confusion low on the kids and to hit the standards as best as we can."
May creates the online textbook in the slideshow program Google Slides and then uploads it to Google Classroom for students and parents to view.
"I think from my standpoint, too, it helps the parents," May said. "I'll be honest. I had a parent-teacher conference this year where a parent said, 'I just wish we had a textbook to look at.' This isn't a traditional textbook, but it is a packet to where they can, if they're trying to help their son or daughter, they can flip back and they'll see some examples."
The online textbooks are created in Google Slides and posted to Google Classroom. The course material within the textbooks meets state education standards.
The first summer she participated in the course, she completed two units worth of materials.
"I like (to) get this stuff going," she said. "It's like I can plan a lot easier because you have everything organized and ready to go. You're going to find with certain groups of students, certain activities are going to work better than others."
Creating textbooks online not only saves the district money, but also allows May to revise and customize classroom materials.
"I'll try to change the names in the book based on the kids we have with some of the problems I have made up myself," she said. "I'll find a typo, and find that something looks better than what this does."
The textbooks include all of the unit lessons, as well as examples, assignments and quizzes at the end of each unit, May said. Pages of the book are printed out during class for students to show their work.
"If they're not in class or we're not here, or they didn't understand it, they can go to this video (example) and it leads them to everything," May said.
From left, Coldwater Middle School math teachers Marty Schoenherr, David Bertke and Connie May use an online course to craft their very own online textbooks.
Fifth grade math teachers David Bertke and Marty Schoenherr plan to follow May's lead and create fifth grade math textbooks together this summer.
"Now that being said, are we going to get ours done over the summer?" Bertke said. "I highly doubt it, because it's going to be a long process, too."
Teachers sign up for certain amount of work hours outside the classroom that involve writing the lesson, proofreading it, showing the work and then submitting it.
"This is what I spend that time doing," May said. "Normally I sign up for anywhere from 75 hours in the summer working on it to 100."
The online textbooks also allow for students to stay on track if out sick, May said.
Both teachers feel teacher-written textbooks may become more common, at least at Coldwater.
"I don't want to speak for other teachers, but like social studies, I don't know if that's ever going to happen," she said. "But for math, yes. … I think anybody that actually goes through and does something like this, you gain a greater understanding of your content material. I think you also get a better direction."
