Ditch That Textbook : Free Your Teaching And Revolutionize Your Classroom by Matt Miller

Author: Matt Miller
View book: Ditch That Textbook : Free Your Teaching And Revolutionize Your Classroom

Are you prepared for a transformation? If you are searching for a dynamic, stimulating, and ground-breaking education, it is essential that you acquire the correct concepts, resources, and individuals, all in the correct sequence. If this resonates with you, then you are ready to abandon outdated mindsets and approaches and embrace empowering and liberating ones. In his book “Ditch That Textbook,” Matt Miller, an author and educator, presents a roadmap for selecting and integrating teaching methods that are:

• Different – Deviating from the everyday experiences of students
• Innovative – Utilizing new ideas and modifying existing ones
• Tech-laden – Incorporating digital platforms, tools, and devices
• Creative – Exploiting students’ original ideas alongside your own
• Hands-on – Encouraging students to create and experiment independently

Ditch That Textbook is packed with actionable guidance, specific tool recommendations, and the motivation you need to revolutionize your classroom. It will inspire you to develop teaching practices that resonate with students and make learning an enjoyable experience for them.

Ditch That Textbook: Revolutionize Your Teaching with Digital Resources

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Hello everybody and welcome to the Tech Educator Podcast episode number 94 – Ditch That Textbook. My name is Jeff Bradbury, thank you so much for joining us. We have a great show lined up today. Our guest is going to be Matt Miller, author of the brand new book Ditch That Textbook, which is an amazing book. We’re going to be talking to him in just a few moments. But first, I want to bring on our co-host for the night Mr. Sam Patterson. Sam, how are you today? How are things over in Puppetland?

Things in Puppetland are amazing. I actually had a great conversation with Mike Chen today, the CEO of TickleApp. I tell you, Tickle is an app that I use on the iPad to control my Sparrow as well as Ollie, and they just came out with Arduino control. So, I’m getting ready to use it to create an entire light system on my bike that starts flashing like mad if cars get too close. That’s pretty geeky. I’m glad that I have some time to do that stuff now. You also have some time to be putting together your presentations for ISTE coming up. How is all that coming?

Oh man, if I told you it was coming along great, would you get off my back? It’s actually really phenomenal. I’m super excited about this STEM and robots Birds of a Feather session. Waka has been working really hard on the puppets guide to high engagement teaching demo and the one I’m most excited about is the teaching reading through code workshop, and that has come together really nicely. We were looking forward to all of that.

There’s of course some great stuff happening over on TeacherCast. As Sam alluded to, we are doing a panel discussion live. It’s going to be broadcast live over on TeacherCast TV on Tuesday from 10:45 to 11:45, featuring Jamie Cass up and Jenny Grey Beck and Waka the moderator. Sorry, Sammy didn’t make the cut, but we are going to be talking all about a school district and how you can ditch your textbook for Microsoft, Apple, and Google technologies. What is the best technology find out there?

There’s of course several great ways to reach out to us. You can find us on our website, Teachercast.org, where we have all 94 of our great stuff. This show, of course, is going to be archived live over on teachercast.net/TEP94. There is, of course, other great stuff happening over on TeacherCast. Our latest episode of Educational Podcasting Today just came out with our good friend Dustin Hartzler from the Your Website Engineer Podcast. We’re talking all about WordPress in that article, talking about how to create, how to design, how to do pretty interesting things. So if you’re new to WordPress, check it out. If you are advanced using WordPress, check that out as well. And Sam, you and I put together a post today called “8 Secrets to Providing Amazing EdTech Customer Service”. What is this all about, Sam?

It’s about the fact that you and I have both been in this teaching with tech space for some time, and in just the work we do every day, it becomes clear that there are companies that win teachers over every day, and there are companies that just lose teachers every day. Especially, when you’re thinking about startups and educators and that kind of thing, really helping people understand the importance of customer service, and how customer service for teachers has to be incredibly responsive, is really important. So, you know, we sat down and we talked about our experiences over time, and what had really stood out to us, and we kind of put those together into a post. But it’s really just the beginning of some pretty deep work that I’m gonna make you do a lot of, Jeff, that looks at talks to companies and really quantifies these experiences to make it easier for younger companies to see trends of what successful companies do to get teachers on board and to keep them happy and sharing their product. So, if you are listening to this and you are an EdTech company, certainly check out that post. We might even send it to you for some feedback, and I know eventually we’re gonna be coming out with a similar survey for teachers of what they want.

There’s, of course, one more thing I want to share with you guys. Our partnership with Microsoft is amazing. If you are at ISTE, we’re gonna be broadcasting live from the Microsoft Education, on Tuesday from one to five. I’m so looking forward to it, and Waka is actually gonna be a part of that too. We’re gonna be talking to the Skype team, we’re gonna be talking to the Minecraft team, we’re gonna be talking to the OneNote team, and we’re gonna be having a special presentation of the brand new Windows 10 coming out. But, I wanted to see Sam if Waka is available, because Waka is actually going to be doing a guest session with us, where Waka is gonna be doing a mystery Skype. And so, the whole idea behind doing that is that we’re gonna send Waka away, almost as if it was a one-way ticket, and we are gonna then Skype with him. Waka, what do you think? You’re gonna get a chance to go out and work with the Microsoft team. Can you go back to the, said Waka, away yes? We’re gonna actually, we’re gonna be live on the Microsoft stage, it’s gonna be phenomenal. We’re gonna be broadcasting this live, so Craig Yen and everybody who’s not at ISTE, we’re gonna be using #notatISTE, it’s gonna be there, and we’re gonna send you away, and you know, we’re gonna Skype with you and you’re gonna tell us where you are and how far away you actually have gone, how far away will I be? Well, it depends. I mean, we’re gonna start off the show with you at the booth and we’re just gonna point in the direction and, you know, like I said, we’re gonna be there for about four hours, so you might get pretty far away. Okay, that sounds like a lot of fun. Jeff, I’m really looking forward to it. Well, if you go find Clippy, let us know. There’s, of course, other great things happening over on our website. I want to share one more thing here all the way at the end. We have a three-part video that we’re starting. This is a brand-new series on how to use Microsoft OneNote. You might recall we did about 10 live shows on the Tech Educator podcast and TeacherCast network with the Microsoft edu team, and we are starting to build online courses for all of these great Microsoft educational products, and so the first three have come out all about Microsoft OneNote. If you haven’t checked out OneNote, it is a pretty amazing. Sam, what did you think about all that great stuff we were doing with Microsoft?

We had the No team, we had Sway on; pretty amazing stuff coming out of that Microsoft camp. Definitely amazing, and it’s really important that—they’ve been able to pivot towards what education needs at this point. They’re really emerging, as they’re working hard at it, but they’re really emerging as a company that’s much more—you know, education-cognizant than they have in the past, where it’s been—they’ve been focused on being essentially a business company that was available to education. Sam, I’m gonna ask you just to drop your camera just a little bit as we go here. You know, one of the things that has been going around Twitter is this new hashtag called #ditchthattextbook, and we are so fortunate today to have the author of Ditch That Textbook on. I want to bring out Mr. Matt Miller. Matt, how are you today?

Good, good. Well, hey, thank you. It sort of comes from my journey as a beginning teacher and— not to bore you with all the details, but basically for the first few years my teaching career, I was a real traditional teacher, taught a lot out of the textbook, questions at the end of the chapters, workbook pages, worksheets and all of that, and I’m a high school Spanish teacher. I started to realize after a couple of years that my kids couldn’t speak Spanish, and that was sort of a problem. One day, in sort of what I call a calculated moment of frustration, I basically told my students, okay, you’re taking those textbooks, and you’re putting them in these big cabinets in the back of my room. It was bumpy for a little while going without textbooks, but in the end, we started creating more things, engaging more things online, I was talking to my students in Spanish more, and the whole experience was just much better. So, Ditch That Textbook was sort of born out of all of that. The book gets into a couple of different things. One is why we should go digital, just the power behind having digital technology in your classroom and engaging your students with it. It talks about ditch that mindset because so much of what we used to do with education, what a lot of people still do with education, just isn’t relevant in today’s world anymore. There’s another section just called Ditch That Textbook that has some ideas for engaging with your students, with less reliance on the textbook. Then, there’s a fourth part, Ditch That Curriculum, which is sort of what I had to do after I got rid of my textbooks, is figure out what am I going to teach, and how is it going to match up with standards and everything at my school is all about. So, that’s the book in a nutshell.

Well, let’s help people figure out where to find that. I’m going to bring up your website here, DitchThatTextbook.com. Before I ask you the most important question, which is, how did you make that really cool book graphic on the bottom right, I am curious to know what was the experience like going through and taking these ideas, putting them into writing form, and then crafting this book and putting it together? Painful.

Oh, it was painful. Are you okay? Yes, yes, I’m okay now. No, you know how they say that writing is nothing, nothing worse than just opening up a vein, and that’s sort of the way it was for me. It was taking, I started with, kind of this hodgepodge of ideas. When I started to write the book, my publisher, Dave Burg, just said, what you ought to do is write your manifesto, what is your manifesto in education, what do you want people to know, what do they need to know. So, trying to gather all of these thoughts and all these directions all into one place, I mean, it took—it would, there were an awful lot of word webs and papers and Evernote notes and different things like that, and they all sort of came together into a table of contents, and it just kind of went from there. So, there’s some things that are similar to blog posts that I’ve written on Ditch That Textbook, and lots of original content and it was—it was several months of just deciding what makes it, what doesn’t work.

Well, let’s help people figure out where to get this, I’m going to bring up your Amazon link here. I actually have my copy right here, my Ditch That Textbook by Matt Miller. How you doing Matt?

Good, good. Well, hey thank you. Sort of comes from my journey as a beginning teacher. Not to bore you with all the details, but basically for the first few years of my teaching career, I was a real traditional teacher. I taught a lot out of the textbook: questions at the end of the chapter, workbook pages, worksheets, and all of that. I’m a high school Spanish teacher, and I started to realize after a couple years that my kids couldn’t speak Spanish, and that was sort of a problem. One day in sort of what I call a calculated moment of frustration, I basically told my students, “Okay, you’re taking those textbooks and putting them in these big cabinets in the back of my room.” It was bumpy for a little while going without textbooks, but in the end, we started creating more things, engaging more things online; I was talking to my students in Spanish more. And the whole experience was just much better, so Ditch That Textbook was sort of born out of all of that. The book gets into a couple different things: one is why we should go digital, it talks about ditch that mindset because so much of what we used to do with education, what a lot of people still do with education just isn’t relevant in today’s world anymore. There is another section just called Ditch That Textbook, it has some ideas for engaging with your students with less reliance on the textbook, then there’s a fourth part called Ditch That Curriculum, which is what I had to do after I got rid of my textbooks, figuring out what am I going to teach, how is it going to match up with standards and everything that my school is all about.

I gotta tell you, this is a really impressive book. I love the content and the way it’s laid out. You got the little QR codes in here, it really is something. Thank you!

Thank you. It’s like opening up a vein sometimes. You know how they say writing is like opening up a vein? It’s that way sometimes.

I did that opening up a vein. Which vein is it?

It’s the left ventricle.

Your left or my left?

It doesn’t matter. So, I used—don’t ask me—I used the textbook that I had to create my digital textbooks.

Really? You made it out of paper?

No, my digital textbooks are digital, but I used a textbook to create the curriculum. Does that make more sense?

Yes, but tell me more.

I had done my homework before I started. There were some days that were better than others.

Well, Matt, I gotta tell you, I’m learning a lot here by reading this book and I’m glad I finally got a copy. I’m gonna bring it with me to the Google Summit in Connecticut and I’m gonna autograph it for all the people that want to know how to ditch that textbook.

Thank you! If you have any tips on how to stay sane while writing a book, let me know.

First, run or walk. Second, create a big mess. Third, take your time. Finally, own your education.

Well, thank you for sharing those tips.

You’re welcome. I’m always here for you.