CK-12

CK-12 has been working on digital textbook publication for some time now.  Part of the California free digital textbook initiative.  They are good books and have content that is available online and free for students to use, but the questions and practice problems are still a little iffy.  These are not books that I would adopt for a classroom just yet, but they are a good source of information for students and they do have good information, but the practice and reinforcement is still lacking.

The website they have been creating has gotten a boost over the last few months and does seem to be making improvements.  The user interface is a little bit weird and does not mesh with the rest of chrome, but again, they are getting better.

One of the things that I would like to see are more thought provoking questions.  The questions they have for science are a mostly rote memorization questions.  As we are moving to common core testing, text, and questions I wonder if the questions will change at all.  I imagine they will, but that will require another overhaul of what they already have going as the questions are all teacher submitted and there would have to be a way for teachers to input these questions.

For what it is currently, this is a good website to have and a good resource for students to use with the chromebooks.