#edchat rookie observations

So tonight was my first concerted effort at staying afloat in an edchat. I have been in the shallow end a few times, but tonight I dove off the high dive and cannon balled my way in. Man you want to talk about fast moving, I thought I was jumping into a pool and it was actually a river! Like Ferris said, "Life moves pretty fast." Well so does edchat. The topic was on eBooks/readers. It quickly turned into, for some anyway, textbooks are evil and if you use them you are not a very good teacher. Well, I don't agree with this. I view textbooks just like I view any other tool I have learned about. In capable hands they can used effectively as part of an array of tools. If you take the best teacher in the world armed with only a textbook and the worst teacher in the world with all of the tools, gadgets and anything else they want, and put them side by side, which one is going to get the most out of not only the tool, but the students? For me, it seems simple. The one common piece in any classroom where the students are thriving is a highly prepared, highly motivated, extremely skilled teacher. The tools only add to the effectiveness, they do not define it.