Discovery Techbook anyone use it?

[Ggg]

Or did you use any type of interactive text book?  If what?  

 

TIA

[Love_to_Read]

I did the 7 day trial.  I loved the idea of it...it looked really, really wonderful in many educationally sound ways.  I wonder whether I missed an introductory teacher video somewhere. though, because no matter how I searched the help area, I really struggled to find an efficient way of implementing it.  As best as I could tell, I would have needed to assign every single assignment one at a time, even using the suggested lesson plan exactly as written.  That can't be right.  There has to be a way to auto-schedule the default.  I *almost* went ahead and bought it with the commitment to just making time to set it up weekly, but a large part of why I was looking at it in the first place was prioritizing ease of implementation...I need something fairly independent and open-and-go this year for science.  If you can figure out how to make it that way during your free trial, it looks amazing.

Oh, one other issue was that I was looking for Earth Science, and it spent a LOT of time on the age of the earth.  I want to cover the basics of evolutionary and creationist theories, but I'd really rather focus more on modern day observable phenomena...the rest of geology, meteorology, oceanography, astronomy, etc., etc.  There was a ton of dense information packed into the evolutionary chapters, way too much to just skip or come back to, and it was scheduled right near the front of the book. I'd much rather start with a solid understanding of Earth Science in general before getting into the historical aspects, and I wasn't going to have time to prepare supplementary materials to do the debate justice.  

I ended up deciding to do CK-12's interactive Flexbook.  It's completely customizable, so I can pull in some extra links where I want to, and the main emphasis for the Earth Science wasn't historical geology.  It still has videos, and the Plix part of the site consists of interactive games on the same concepts as the Flexbook.  The labs are links to stuff around the web, so that part is going to involve a bit more previewing than I'd like, to make sure links are still valid and we have all the supplies, etc., but it's very good for being free.  It was still prepared by a committee of certified teachers, has tests and workbook pages available, some online practice questions besides the games, some teacher advice though not as much as Discovery.

And then at the last moment we decided to postpone Earth Science one more year in favor of doing Physical Science with Conceptual Academy, but we have been using CK-12 for supplementing a few concepts. So far so good. Hope you get a review from a more experienced user, but based on what we've done in August, I'd recommend it. Not sure whether I'd rank it higher than Discovery, but it is more user-friendly to set up and fairly close.  FTR, Conceptual Academy is based on a printed textbook, but has some interactive features such as videos and online quizzes.  There's a thread here about it.  We're enjoying it.  Next year, we'll probably do CK-12 Earth Science, but might do the Discovery Techbook for Chemistry.

Edited August 18, 2016 by Love_to_Read

[catz]

I bought it but I've hardly looked at it yet, so I'm following ...

[Ggg]

Love_to_Read

 

Like you I am having issues, so thinking I am missing something...I am looking for a good sound interactive easy to implement High Scool Chemistry program. Is there such a thing?

Thank you