Michael Banovsky

However, Donna Quan, the TDSB’s academic deputy director, cautioned that while schools will be equipped with wireless Internet by 2015, students will likely have to wait several more years before digital textbooks become reality.

I read my friend Jenny Yuen’s piece on how kids in Toronto are using outdated text books (see above quote) and thought, “We can do better.”

Friends in the publishing industry: start taking notes. Build a textbook marketplace for schools using an ebook format, allow in-browser viewing, email-able notes and annotations…

Why stop there? To compile sources for an essay would be simple: highlight the text you want and save it to an online bucket (nobody has bought Delicious yet…) It’s also easy to make tests (just highlight the text to create a question), track plagiarism (have kids upload their documents into the system and parse essays for terms similar to the research material) and promote collaborative learning (the students could read, track and share digital notes written by classmates.) You could also be creepy and allow the teacher to see how far a student has read into a particular book.

Once the raw data is in the system, creating things like iOS apps and games that help kids learn the material before tests is simple. 

All you’d really need is a robust indexing system, a method of searching…If you combined 37 Signals’ Basecamp, Amazon Kindle software, Layers (or Awesome Highlighter), and the best parts of Wikipedia, well, you’d be onto something big.

Charge school boards a subscription fee based on unlimited use and a certain number of students—once you get enough source material each curriculum could be tailored accordingly (Catholic schools, public schools, French language schools, ESL—English as a Second Language—programs, colleges, universities, trade schools, etc.)

If you could build hubs around specific topics that show text books with links to ever-changing news feeds, Wiki pages, and other online information, you’d be the darling of every shrinking school board budget in the West. Imagine the impact of thousands of music students, say, posting on YouTube their practice videos, or drama students comparing the delivery of lines for a school play.

Hell, if anyone thinks this is a good idea and wants to create a startup…Don’t worry, what I’ve written here is only the tip of my thought process on this one.