Tag Archives: textbook

General

Turn Textbooks into Art With Upcycling

Need a great way to combine hands-on Makerspace activities with getting rid of some textbooks? Check out Edudemic’s post about Textbook Upcycling! From fedoras to planters the ideas are limitless.

Take the activities beyond upcycling and talk to them about product life-cycles. Check out the 21-minute documentary, The Story of Stuff. In it, students trace the life of a product and see the impact of each item they buy.

General, School Media Specialist

A reason to celebrate: More free textbooks from CK-12

Steve's Birthday PartyCK-12’s collection of over 100,000 textbooks just keeps growing!  The free resource platform now has roughly 106,000 texts provided by about 30,000 schools.  For more on this announcement, click here.

If you’re unfamiliar with CK-12, check out their page here.  The site has resources for math, science, English, history, and even SAT prep!

Image credit: http://tinyurl.com/ljjktht, licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

 

Check this out:, School Media Specialist

Question from the Field: Lexiles on Textbooks?

Question MarkAn area media specialist asked: I’m wondering if anyone knows of any place to find the Lexile of textbooks by typing in a portion of the text.  At one time, we could  do this on lexile.com, but it seems as though that’s a paid, site licensed account now.  Right now I have Advanced Placement (AP) teachers getting ready to purchase new textbooks and want to know the level of the potential textbooks.  Can CMLE pull on the wisdom of the region?

Answers to this question

  1. Here is a link to an ATOS level finder:  http://www.renlearn.com/atos/
    You may type in a portion of the level or upload a text file up to 10mb.You should be able to use the ATOS grade level to approximate the Lexile level.  It is not exact since ATOS uses a different calculation rate for their ATOS 2000 Scale.  The difference as stated by Lexile may be found here .It is unfortunate that Lexile requires fees now, but it is the nature of reduced services and budgets that we are all facing.
  2. My teacher uses lexile.com. She says it’s free but you have to set up an account. To save time typing, we’ve scanned a page from the book and converted it from a .pdf to a .txt and then uploaded that to the site. Just a little time saver!
  3. We use the Scholastic Achievement Manager (SAM)
  4. We use Lexile Analyzer
  5. Shouldn’t the textbook companies have this information? Good question….

A big thank you to the busy professionals who offered their quick support and wisdom! Send an email to  cmle@stcloudstate.edu if you are stuck, or have a question you would like to pose to your colleagues to inform your practice.

More Wisdom from the Field? Do these solutions match what you do in your setting? Do you have pearls of wisdom to add to this topic? Please share in the comments field what you know to enrich our toolkit around  this topic. Thanks!