Someone I know told me I should read Dracula. I've never read it, only seen the movie interpretations of it. He said the original was superior to any media interpretation. So my first thought was to download it. So much has changed in the past few years with mobile devices. We can download music, books and pdf's. We can create books to upload and sell. We can create podcasts, interactive books, presentations, documents, etc and place them on the web to share with others. We can find textbooks that have been digitized and are free. We can set up our mobile devices to be our offices so we can sit on a beach and do our work. Even printers are now small enough to put in a bag and take with us. No you don't always need an electrical plug as you can buy those flashlights that you crank and they even allow you to charge your cell phones. So if the connection is the right type, you could power your printer. With the increased improvement in phones, you can use the phone for your office.
I know there is a push to integrate technology into the classroom but its hard because the textbook publishers are a bit behind the technology and most publishers do not have the digitized books. Even the publishers who have books available, these books are not interactive because the interactive element adds to the file size. This does not mean that you as the teacher could not down load a chapter, add links, etc so that students can annotate, make notes, etc and make the students more interactive readers.
Why couldn't we take examples from the books, create presentations so that when the students play them, the steps with explanations come on, one step at a time. Make it with audio, with drawings etc. I know it is common to make videos showing the steps etc but some students do not have a good connection so video is much harder to view while a presentation can often be used in the same situation. I think it is important to create material using presentations, slide shows, audio podcasts, etc.
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