Texas Essential Knowledge And Skills

Online materials bring latest science to classrooms

AUSTIN - Texas educators can choose from 92 online products to cover all new and revised science Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills (TEKS).

Additional materials science were approved today by the State Board of Education.

Districts may begin to order these materials as of August 8, and because the material is electronic, it will be available for use when school opens.

The materials are available for grades 5-8, as well as biology, chemistry, physics and Integrated Physics and Chemistry (IPC).

Today's action is revolutionary on several fronts.For the first time that the adoption has been made on such a compressed schedule, with the final samples of the material arriving in April, under review by panels educator in June, and adopted by the board July.

While the Board has adopted many products that were educational materials online or in electronic form before, this is the first adoption was completely in an electronic format.

It is also the first time that the adoption has been only supplementary materials, rather than consisting of complete manuals. The board took this unique action in response to the state�s budget crisis. The purchase of new comprehensive kindergarten through 12 th grade science materials was estimated to cost $347 million. But by agreeing to purchase only supplemental materials that contain just the new or revised curriculum standards that were approved by the board in 2009 and buying material only for selected grades and subjects, the price tag dropped to $60 million. The new materials will be used in conjunction with science textbooks already in classrooms.

Educators have nine to 14 different products to chose from at each grade level or subject. The list of approved materials is available on the Texas Education Agency website.

The products were all approved contingent on the publishers correcting errors identified by the publishers themselves or the educator textbook review panels. On one product in which the publisher disputed that eight passages were errors, the board directed the commissioner of education to work with the publisher to find mutually acceptable language for the passage.

The board also adopted new Career and Technical Education instructional materials under the Midcycle 2011 Proclamation.

LJ Create: Texas to Save Bucks with eBooks

As with all digital content (such as music, film and app downloads), digital versions of text books are said to have major advantages in terms of reduced production, handing and shipping costs, and are therefore seen by many to be a potential solution to massively reduced education spending imposed by governments. Curriculum supplied in a digital format can also be updated immediately and provide a continuously up-to-date source of reference for the students. Digital textbooks are also seen to be a green solution that will greatly the reduce paper consumption across schools in the state. When the Texas Education Agency (TEA) announced that they intended to replace printed science books used in Texas schools with electronic versions, the well established Texan educational company, “ Technical Laboratory Systems Inc ” (Tech Labs) had a vision of replacing the books with a new and very ambitious 21st century eLearning solution called “ SciTEX Learning ”. Tech Labs, based in Houston, decided to develop a full eLearning solution with engaging, dynamic, multimedia and interactive content as an alternative to ‘eBooks’. After all, most of the elementary schools across Texas are already using media-rich science eLearning materials supplied by tech Labs – why shouldn’t the middle and high schools have access to similar resources as well? They saw little advantage in simply digitizing existing text. This project was a massive undertaking and required a large and highly skilled human resource to action it within a very short time frame. Tech Labs decided to work with one of the world’s best known science, technology and engineering educational software houses, LJ Create Inc . LJ Create is an Anglo-American company who has produced teaching materials for a global market for almost as many years as Tech Labs (Tech Labs was founded in 1977 and LJ in 1979). LJ Create was able to provide a highly experienced and multi-skilled workforce of teachers, eLearning specialists, technical authors, educational editors, photographers, artists, graphic designers, animators, video producers, and software development engineers that the project required. The Tech Labs / LJ partnership for school science resources is no surprise to many science teachers across Texas.

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