A Study on Design and Development of Digital Textbooks for Primary School Students

Abstract

Traditional structure of education is mainly supported by print media. The digitalization of textbooks can turn abstract contents into representational contents, thus making it easier to understand and acquire knowledge in textbooks for primary school students. The teaching affairs will become more efficient through using of digital textbooks. It is significant to focus on user experiences and feelings when digitalizing textbooks. By designing of a digital textbook for primary school Chinese, the authors argue that in order to better realize the teaching goals of primary school Chinese lessons, designers of digital textbooks should create the situation and bring students to specific situation by intuitive videos and pictures; let the pleasant music and poetic pictures narrow the distance between students and texts, motivate the rich imagination of students, stimulate their rich emotions, broaden their spiritual space and call for beauty, thus allowing quality education to be truly implemented. The authors design textbooks 1. Globalization and mainstreaming of digital textbooks Traditional structure of education is mainly supported by print media. It is very simple and boring. As human society enters the digital era in the 21st century, education also follows the digital tide inevitably. In 2006, Edinburgh University Press first published the electronic textbooks. As the globally leading education publisher, Pearson Education Group developed digital learning platform since 1994 and submitted a recommendation of digital course to California state government in 2006. Besides, it has invested $ 20 million in developing digital teaching resources. A variety of digital teaching resources begin to develop rapidly since 2010. As many schools are equipped with complete multi-media classrooms with the access to the Internet, the digitization of various teaching resources especially the textbooks has become the important driver of modern education. At the beginning, digital textbooks were about the digitization of book contents simply. The book contents were copied into CD or e-books so that readers could read by end reader. Education practitioners soon found that it was not teal digital teaching material. The print media teaching materials are still simple and boring. When user demand becomes diverse with the development of network, the user experience of digital teaching materials will become more and more important. The ways of presentation and communication of teaching materials have changed greatly. The boring textbooks integrate high technology, fun, art and innovation of new media age through the way of user experience design and develop into more interesting teaching applications that can interact with learners. Thus, a new age of digital teaching materials is developed. Nowadays, digital teaching materials have become the main theme of the development of digital education. The digitized teaching materials make educational structure diverse and enrich the way, content and activities of education. First of all, teaching is changed from simple talking of teacher to exploratory learning of students. For younger students, teaching adopts more interactive and game models to cultivate their learning ability. The impact of digital textbooks on education is visual reading, interactive experience, personalized learning, multi-sensory learning, participatory learning, rich resource connection, low-cost learning and so on. Of course, digital textbooks also face a lot of