English language curriculums built entirely on a digital platform – replacing written textbooks, worksheets or printed study guides – are about to enter the market from several companies, with promises they will change the nature of classroom learning across the country.
The Obama administration has pledged to provide high-speed Internet connections to 15,000 schools during the next two years. Districts are purchasing tablets and laptops for students, and last week, President Barack Obama announced $400 million in corporate commitments from the software companies Adobe and Prezi, which will donate software to teachers. Meanwhile, other companies are rushing in.
On Monday at an education conference in Austin, Texas, Joel Klein, former chancellor of New York City public schools and current chief executive of Amplify, the education unit of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp., introduced a digital English language arts curriculum for middle school.
Klein said the new software, which will run on a variety of devices and is priced at $45 per student a year, includes videos, games and vocabulary apps and allows teachers to track student writing and give feedback directly online.
“This is not a bunch of souped-up PDFs,” he said, referring to digital versions of print documents.
McGraw Hill, the textbook publisher, has signed a partnership with StudySync, a company that creates digital English curriculum tools deployed in 22,000 classrooms and are priced at about a third of Amplify’s rate.
Scholastic Inc., the children’s publisher, is a familiar player with Read 180, a digital curriculum that targets struggling readers and is used by about 1 million students in 40,000 classrooms across the country. This year, the company also introduced Codex, a more general middle school English digital curriculum being used in 4,300 middle school classrooms.
Among the features of Amplify’s digital curriculum is the ability for teachers to see if students really understand vocabulary words when they use them in Twitter-like hashtags and other social media contexts. The company also has embedded videos relating to a range of classic texts included in e-reader form within the software. One example: to introduce Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, actor Chadwick Boseman, who played Jackie Robinson in the film “42,” performs an early scene with chilling intensity.
Amplify, which introduced a tablet for K-12 schoolchildren last year, has invested about $100 million during the past 2½ years in its education businesses. The new English language arts software is aimed at sixth-, seventh- and eighth-graders.
