peculiar travel suggestions

Minnesota high school statistics teacher Michael Engelhaupt • Discussing how his school, Blaine High School, decided to write their own textbooks, rather than pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for textbooks which would be out-of-date and ill-suited to the school’s state testing. Right now, students can pay $5 to buy a printed-out version, or print from the Web, but eventually they’ll be able to access the material with computers everywhere. And, as things change, they can update the textbooks yearly. The difference in cost to the Anoka-Hennepin school district, by the way, was staggering: It would’ve cost $200,000 to buy textbooks; to get Engelhaupt and his fellow teachers to write them (and to pay for offline versions) cost just $25,000. Not a bad deal. source (via • follow)

Very cool stuff.  One of the local high schools in my district is moving towards a kindle-based cirriculum.  All of the books for English class will be available in E-reader versions.  This works out to be super inexpensive for the schools, because many of the books we teach are public domain, so they have free versions available for download.  No-brainer!

I wonder how the teachers were compensated for authoring/compiling these textbooks and how the copyright on them works. This part of the future of education is really exciting!