Lightbox is an educational platform that publishes digitally enhanced eBooks linked to the US Common Core Curriculum. Lightbox, provided by Follett Destiny, boast their series of eBooks support distance education with blended learning and help build students’ background knowledge and vocabulary (Follett Titlewave, n.d.). Students in schools in Saudi Arabia have been learning online since March 2020, this change was forced and unexpected. As such, educational resources have been given the spotlight; if educational resources can entwine with technology for the benefit of all students, it will ensure their use in future years (Rowan, 2012, p. 217). As a teacher-librarian and English teacher in a Follett Destiny school, I am interested to see if Lightbox eBooks can help set education on the right path.

Functionality & Interactivity: ⭐️⭐️

This review will focus on the Lightbox title How Water Shapes the Earth. When opening the book from Destiny Discover, you are greeted with the front cover of the eBook, containing a looped video of water flowing through a canyon. Across the top in the centre is the title. It is difficult to read as the text colour is similar to the background. At the centre bottom of the page are the buttons ‘Open Lightbox’ and ‘Share’.
(Bell, 2021)

When clicking ‘Open Lightbox’, you are taken to a visual contents page containing thumbnail pictures of each of the pages and the ‘features’ and ‘educational resources’ in a bar along the bottom.

By hovering your mouse over the individual ‘features’ the screen is darkened, highlighting pages that contain the selected feature.

Ease of Reading: ⭐️

The first page of the story is very text-heavy, with small text dominating half the page. Several keywords are underlined and bold; clicking on these words provides the user with a simple but useful definition. Clicking on the arrow on the right-hand side of the screen takes you to the next page. A highly distracting ‘play’ button pulsates from the left-hand side of the screen which prevents the reader from focussing on the text (Combes, 2016).

(Bell, 2021)

Limitations: 😟😟😟😟

The play button takes you to an embedded YouTube video. The video automatically starts after clicking the ‘play’ button, however, if the ‘pause’ button is not selected prior to exiting the video, the audio continues to play in the background. After a quick YouTube search, it was discovered that this video was not content created specifically for the book, rather it is embedded from GeoScience Videos’ YouTube channel, seemingly without attribution. Furthermore, the embedded video is downloadable, which seems to be in breach of YouTube’s Terms of Service.

Throughout the book, clicking on the ‘audio’ button has no effect. The text is not read, nor is it highlighted to support print awareness (Yokota & Teale, 2014, p. 583).

On a further page, there is an ‘activity’ button that forwards you to a downloadable and printable PDF on writing an expository essay.

Later in the book there is a ‘website’ button that forwards you to a website by Ducksters that provides an entire page of facts.

Educational Merit: ⭐️⭐️

Throughout the book, ‘key facts’ are highlighted in circles at the bottom of the page, and while relevant to the text, they demand the reader’s attention, thus drawing away from the reader from the text (Combes, 2016).

As an educator, I keep coming back to the highlighted and distracting elements, including flashing buttons and highlighted ‘facts’. What is the purpose of providing highlighted ‘key facts’? As a reader, it is what my eyes jumped to upon arrival on the page, yet when trying to remember the facts, I couldn’t.

(Bell, 2021)

Lightbox has the opportunity to develop some truly exceptional educational resources. The curriculum links and links to further reading, videos and activities is poorly sequenced and does little to enhance the reader’s experience. How Water Shapes the Earth, if not Lightbox overall, does very little to include students in what Rowan describes as authentic active learning (2012, p. 219). By providing little opportunity for students to interact with and participate in their learning, they are left to become “passive consumers of a predefined set of ‘curriculum truths’” (Rowan, 2012, p. 219). This active participation could be in the form of links to community websites that support students sharing their learning in a safe space. However, education remains the responsibility of teachers, and how this text is used may influence its value. How would you use this text to support active participation rather than passive consumption?

References:

Combes, Barbara. (2016). Digital Literacy : A New Flavour of Literacy or Something Different? Synergy (Carlton, Vic.), 14(1).

Follett Titlewave. (n.d.). Lightbox, https://www.titlewave.com/main/lightbox

Rowan, L. (2012). Imagining futures (Ch. 13). In L. Rowan, & C. Bigum (Ed.), Transformative approaches to new technologies and student diversity in futures oriented classrooms: Future proofing education (pp. 217-225). Springer Science +Business Media B.V.

Wiseman, B., (2019). How water shapes the earth. Smart Media Inc. https://openlightbox.com/lightbox/?bookCode=1030&customerID=8508818