Goodbye Textbooks

As the end of term starts to appear in view and schemes of work are being changed in the light of a tumultuous year, decisions are needed about which “printed” resources to order for September. After twenty years of teaching, the moment has come to ditch traditional textbooks completely.

Too many are returned at the end of the year with barely a sign that they have been read or used in any way!

Come September for both AS and A2 groups I will be using a combination of my own study companion (re-written and thoroughly updated over the summer) + the new Anforme revision guides for AS and A2 (written by my former colleague Jim Keefe and Peter Cramp) supported by our VLE (a collaborative resource involving over fifteen schools), the economics blogs and of course other web resources, and the best of the output from the broadsheets.

The ‘analogue’ textbook producers are throwing some hefty amount of cash at virtual learning systems / digital surrounds and much publicised tie-ins with each of the major exam boards. But I am not sure they really quite get it!

My study companions may not necessarily have the gloss and glamour of textbooks professionally designed for bookshops and marketing brochures. But the new Tutor2u study companions that will come out in early August will be right up to date especially in terms of the ever-changing macroeconomic landscape and they are designed to be scribbled in, annotated, highlighted - in other words for the student they will be a working document that can form a textbook replacement but also provide much more in terms of guided reading, links to fresh content in blogs and a community of users in a VLE.

The (vast) money we save on textbooks will go on improving the library of the new genre of contemporary economics books many of which are excellent.

So goodbye textbooks (and all that Kerboodle) I doubt I will use one again between now and retirement