OXBRIDGE™ : The living textbook
For teachers & students
Over the past few years we have observed that teachers worldwide are trying to find more and more new tools and dynamic materials adapted to the needs of their students. In order to fill an important gap in the market, the technological company, Oxinity, proposes a totally different concept of sharing knowledge that goes far beyond the electronic format of a book: the living book.
The big difference with its predecessor, the electronic book, is that now the living book not only can be used in all types of digital devices with synchronized versions for teachers and students, but it allows the editing and improvement of the contents in real time by the teachers that use it. Updating content in the book, therefore, is now as simple as making an entry but with the difference that the improvement will be seen immediately by thousands of users in real time.
To give life to this new innovative concept of book, Oxinity uses state of the art technology adapted in Spain and is nourished by the involvement of a large international community of thousands of mentors, who together supplement the project enabling all its members to contribute and share their experience and materials in the project in order to use and jointly create the teaching material that responds to the needs of the user.
Once an activity is taught, the system allows analysing each activity and deciding if it works well or needs to be rethought. The challenge of this great community of teachers was to agree on the criteria of what constitutes a high quality material and apply the criteria approved by the members in thousands of activities for the classroom.
The living book is designed to offer a student version that contains all the notes of the classes in an app, saving them the need to take notes in class. The class in this way becomes a space for continuous interaction with the teacher, even after the class has finished.
Decisions to leave behind the traditional textbook and replace it with other types of materials is an initiative that many teaching collectives have tried to implement recently. However, until now nobody in the market offered a tool that transcended a certain and relatively small collective of a school and opened the possibility of involving a large-scale teaching community with the aim of reaching the next step in education.
The Oxinity Living Book allows teachers from around the world to participate with their ideas and material contributions under common criteria known and approved by the community to generate high quality classes with effective deployment of preparation.
And how can you give life to a textbook? Such a concept implies a serious shift in the paradigm of collaborative work of teachers. Far from being a mere application that stores activities, the living book consists of setting as a team the curricular contents of a subject, providing all teachers with a tool that allows them to prepare and share activities and assemble these activities in classes ready to be used according to the subject, the level and age of the student, their interests and needs.
No one person has the overall monopoly on the right way to teach but with the living book our system breaths, adapts, grows and reacts to the world around it, mirroring any other living thing.
A textbook is stagnant, it doesn’t change; the living book moves with the times as ideas, methods and systems are modified. The living book is never stagnant, what it was yesterday is not the same as it is today and nor will be like that tomorrow.
The starting point of the project is a simple exchange: each teacher prepares an activity a week but in return receives hundreds of activities grouped into classes with which their time of preparation is drastically reduced and the quality of the class and the student involvement is significantly enhanced. Each activity, after being taught in class, is marked and evaluated. Once evaluated, the best activities are stored and constitute a quality and the activities with a lower score are reframed and improved by other teachers.
The system stores and analyses hundreds of thousands of activities, all grouped and referenced under common criteria, shared by all teachers. In addition, students also evaluate each of their classes and thus we obtain cross-data that allows us to find out which contents work best and which ones to improve.
The living book has a double purpose: by offering its users editable content, the quality of the classes is greatly improved in real time. This also impacts positively the performance and quality of the classes, allowing teachers to make the most of the class because they rely on a tool that works for them and gives them everything they need. The living book empowers them to take full advantage of their personal qualities as it provides content of great diversity and creativity and requires a minimum preparation.
The living book, which is a game-changer in the educational paradigms in the field of languages, can also be applied to any subject that you want to teach. Not only it is an application that can be adapted to any area of knowledge, but it also entails a shift in the models of collaborative work, facilitating the participation of thousands of teachers on a global scale, providing access to a system that grants a great diversity of models from which to learn, perfect and take the teaching to the limits that our students really deserve.
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