I was reading an old issue of Tech & Learning magazine from my cousin-in-law who encouraged me to create a curriculum for informing teachers and students about copyright laws. There is definitely a need as it is often not addressed and many plead ignorance on the issue. In an article about copyrights, I learned about ccLearn which is a must in your diigo or delicious bookmarks. It offers a lot of valuable resources for teaching within the bounds of the copyright laws. For example, on their site I learned about ck-12 which is a website that allows you to create open source textbooks, tailored to the standards that you want to cover.
A large chunk of school budgets is in textbooks and workbooks and with many schools looking to cut costs, digital textbooks are becoming the new wave. We have all heard of web 2.0 but today I learned about textbook 2.0 and the push to go 3.0 soon. Digital textbooks are evelving while allow multimedia, interaction, and up-to-date information in a pdf format that can be viewed on astudent laptop, iPod, or even a phone. I am teaching two new classes this Fall and there are no textbooks for the course...but that's okay! Currently, I am working on a digital textbook and interactive course website tailored to the class that can be downloaded and viewed on various mobile media chosen by the student.