Open-Source Early Literacy Materials Gaining Some Attention

phooky writes "Although open teaching materials have been available at the university level for a while now, there have been very few materials for younger learners. That's beginning to change now with the advent of Free-Reading, a free, wiki-based resource for early literacy instruction. The availability of free materials could free up millions of dollars from school budgets for more teachers and training. From the USA Today article: 'Last fall, a Florida textbook adoption committee approved Free-Reading, a remediation program for primary-school children that's believed to be the first free, open-source reading program for K-12 public schools. It's awaiting approval by Eric Smith, the state's incoming education commissioner, who could approve it by mid-December. Florida is one of the top five textbook markets in the USA, so its move could lead to the development of other free materials that might someday challenge the dominance of a handful of big educational publishers.'"

Comments

My Highschool did something similar

[Bryansix]

They compiled a book completely from literature that was out of copyright from the Internet and then took that book and sent it off to be printed and bound for the whole class. This was back in 1998 and the school was Arcadia High School in California.

I work for a large textbook company & its a sc

[Anonymous Coward]

I've worked for one of the leading textbook publishers for four years and I know firsthand just what a scam it is for our educational system. What sort of value do those $120 books really give to students? Not a hell of a lot. The books are the SAME from edition to edition in most cases.

Most books are on two or three year revision cycles - THIS IS GUARANTEED INCOME. Every three years time to buy another book. Wake up, its a scam to bleed our education system dry. You want to make use of a used book? Fuck you, buddy. You know how we prevent that? We make websites that you HAVE to purchase a code to get into. Professors use the sites to distribute homework and take tests and if you don't subscribe, then you are SOL. The result is everyone needs to buy the damn book every damn semester.

These publishers will do anything and everything to keep the turnover high and used book market dead.

Colleges and university really need to make their intranets more effective and make the textbook publishers work with them. Refuse to pay more than $30 for books and we'll have a much more affordable education system!!

Re:The downloadable flash-cards

[weighn]

are in ".doc" format files generated with Microsoft Wrod. Not so open source. not sure where you're looking, but these letter-cards are in PDF.
If there is stuff in Word format there, I guess someone is welcome to contribute by converting them to PDF.

Re:The downloadable flash-cards

[aegl]

I was on this page ... http://free-reading.net/index.php?title=Sounding_out_word_cards there is a pdf version as well as a doc version