Friday, September 18, 2009

Chapter 1 complete

Chapter one is complete and can be downloaded on www.michiganmath.org!

One thing that is very noticeable about the chapter is it's immediate usage of the TI-83 graphing calculator. Since I am able to put a graphing calculator in every one of my students hands, this was not a problem for the field test class. However, what would I do if I didn't have the calculators? Actually... I would simply alter the investigations to take out the graphing calculator parts or combine them into an appendix available for those students who have calculators.

That's really the point of an open source textbook... Everything is written and downloaded in easily edited .doc files. If something doesn't fit, change it. You don't have to subscribe to some textbook publisher's desire to create a national product. That is, textbooks are written to a national audience, but standards and expectations vary slightly from state to state. Only use what you like. Experiment. Customize. Have you ever heard of a textbook that can do that?!! Probably not. Rather, you bought a textbook and said, "I dont like that chapter." or you found mistakes that you couldn't fix because you couldn't access the text.

So for me, the graphing calculator section early and throughout the text works... but it if it doesn't for you, change it. You'll find the changes are most likely minor because the basic structure is already there.

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