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[quote=Anonymous]I'm an old elementary school teacher. I started teaching in 1992. At that time students in Grades 3-6 still had proper math, science and social studies textbooks. We mostly did away with Reading/Language arts textbooks in the 90s and students were more likely to be reading trade books.

In my opinion, schools moved away from using textbooks for the content areas because fewer and fewer students could read at grade level. To read a typical 6th grade science textbook and answer the questions at the end of the chapter (a common HW assignment in the 1990s) students had to be reading at at least a 4th or 5th grade reading level. When 1/3 of your students can't really read the text, you can't assign it as independent work. Teachers needed to come up with accommodations for the students who couldn't read the text.

Now with the textbooks all online, students can click and have the text read out loud to them. However, they have lost that valuable reading practice of actually having to read the text. Reading chapter 6 and answering questionis 1-10 at the end of the chapter may never have been a very engaging assignment, but I was an ESOL teacher and I would sit and help my ESOL students read the text, read the questions at the end, and locate the answer in the text. It was actually a valuable practice and helped expose them to a lot of science and social studies vocabulary and knowledge they may not have picked up in the class.  Nowadays students miss a LOT of that. They do watch some videos and pretend to listen to the read aloud text, but it just isn't the same thing.[/quote]

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