Title: Usefulness of the electronic textbook: implementation difficulties. Experience with authoring and implementing e-books in Slovene schools

Authors: Tomaz Amon

Addresses: Trzaska 11, SL-1000 Ljubljana, Slovenia

Abstract: The electronic textbook, together with the virtual reality worlds on the web, presents a better tool for education than the paper textbook alone; the paper textbook can be included as a pdf file. The interactivity, ease of transport, duplication and adaptation make such material very practical. A cell-tissue-body CD ROM, which is a dynamic hypertext mark-up language (HTML) and virtual reality mark-up language (VRML) website, was produced to teach biology in primary and secondary schools in Slovenia. Because this project is supported by the Ministry of Education, it is free to obtain and is recognised as one of the official textbooks in Slovene schools. This e-book is slowly being implemented into the everyday teaching process. This paper will discuss the advantages and disadvantages of e-books, and also the difficulties of implementing them in our schools. Finally, thoughts on how to overcome the obstacles to future updates of this and other projects will be discussed.

Keywords: education; visualisation; software; biology; medicine; VRML; cellular structure; cellular function; simulation; cricket; insect; e-books.

DOI: 10.1504/IJCEELL.2003.003274

International Journal of Continuing Engineering Education and Life-Long Learning, 2003 Vol.13 No.3/4, pp.280 - 288

Published online: 07 Aug 2003 *

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