We provide a more modern and superior form of presentation content for lecturers.
For starters, a zyBook itself can be projected during lecture. Instructors can zoom in, highlight text, play animations, code in coding windows, etc. This is how many instructors (including us) use the content, largely obviating the need for slides entirely.
Plus, we have a “View as presentation” mode that strips items like paragraphs and question sets, leaving figures, tables, animations, coding windows, and more items that normally would just be copied into a traditional slide. All defined terms are automatically made into large bulleted text, like on a traditional slide.
Having information duplicated between a book and slides is not necessarily good for students, as it requires them to reconcile the information. For most textbooks, having slides is nice since they summarize lengthy text content. In contrast, a zyBook is designed to use concise text and teaches through animations, questions, tools, etc. instead.
Redundant material (book plus slides) makes continual improvement of material harder; the more places that information needs to be changed, the harder it is to make changes, and the more likely that content will stagnate. Maintenance and continual improvement are essential in this era of publishing.
We have placed tremendous effort into animating most key concepts. Creating a redundant set of animations in PowerPoint is unwise and creates a further maintenance problem as well.
What if the internet fails during lecture? First, many instructors today (including us) rely on the internet during lecture for several things: Coding in a cloud IDE, playing videos, displaying in-class surveys, projecting student work, etc. So it’s not just the zyBook that uses the internet during lecture. Second, an instructor who wishes to project content during an internet outage can preemptively save our content by using their browser’s “Save page as –> Webpage complete” for each section, or printing a chapter to pdf. While the saved content won’t be interactive, the content can be projected to help get the instructor through the internet outage.
Learn to use presentation view from this article on using presentation view.