McDougal Littell textbooks are used everyday by students and educators on campuses and in classrooms throughout the United States and other areas of the world. McDougal Littell textbooks have an interesting and slightly convoluted corporate history. In 2007, publishing company Holt, Rinehart and Winston merged with the publishing company McDougal Littell.
During this time, Holt, Rinehart and Winston was actually the educational department of the larger corporation Harcourt Education. Harcourt Education is of course a department within the Houghton Mifflin Harcourt company. So, beginning in 2007, McDougal Littell textbooks officially became Holt McDougal textbooks. This name change should become more visible as new additions and revisions of past McDougal Littell textbooks are distributed worldwide.
Holt McDougal develops and distributes textbooks that focus on a diverse variety of academic subjects. The most popular subjects that their textbooks tend to cover include mathematics, social studies, health, science, language arts, and several world languages as well. The textbook publishing company has also developed and distributed several childrens’ books too.
The one thing that can be said about McDougal Littell textbooks is that they are a product of some of the most trusted names in the textbook publishing history. Both Holt, Rinehart and Winston as well as McDougal Littell have put out extremely high-quality educational materials in the recent decades. With both of these textbook publishing powerhouses pushing out cutting-edge content, both online and off-line, the future appears to be quite promising and convenient for educators and students looking to pursue their academic goals.
Online Learning Is Easy With McDougal Littell Textbooks
Students that are using McDougal Littell textbooks often now have additional online resources to help them understand the material contained within their textbooks. One of the most popular online student resources for McDougal Littell textbooks is the Holt Online Learning center found at My.HRW.com and ClassZone.com. The quality of information contained within these online student resources clearly illustrates Holt McDougal’s dedication to the continued development of digital content distribution channels.
MediaSmart and WriteSmart
Holt McDougal now offers two DVD-ROMs to accompany their writing textbooks. MediaSmart and WriteSmart have both received the prestigious “select” accreditation from the Promethean Software Accreditation Programme. MediaSmart, which also received an Award of Excellence from the magazine Tech & Learning in 2008, provides students with a variety of media clips from popular culture. Featuring video footage from news reports, popular cinema, commercials, political ads, and PSAs, the DVD-ROM encourages students to draw meaningful connections between these familiar media forms and the rhetorical and literary concepts of persuasion, setting, narrative development, and argument. These accessible media images provide a way to engage students while teaching essential critical thinking and analytical skills. The MediaSmart materials directly supplement material available in Holt McDougal’s physical textbook. However, the media materials may also be used as teaching tools independently from the accompanying book.
Like MediaSmart, WriteSmart is also an interactive resource for students and their teachers. The student version of WriteSmart includes revision activities, interactive student models, and graphic organizers. The WriteSmart teacher edition contains all of the video clips from MediaSmart and also contains a wealth of pedagogical resources for the writing classroom. There are several resources available for lesson planning, including interactive student models, revision lessons, ideas for writing, and over 250 individual writing prompts. Additionally, the DVD-ROM contains several organizational aids, including a Rubric Generator and an interactive graphic organizer. The MediaSmart and WriteSmart DVD-ROMs may be used together to create the most effective learning experience inside the classroom.
The Promethean accreditation of both software programs was based on an extensive evaluation of their effectiveness in several key learning areas. Evaluators examined the programs in terms of their group teaching pedagogy, ease of use, and their effectiveness when deployed within a larger, interactive classroom environment. The WriteSmartand MediaSmart DVD-ROMs are also fully compatible with ACTIVboard white boards and many other interactive classroom tools. Integrating WriteSmart and MediaSmart into a larger interactive classroom can help to encourage collaboration between students and can even raise student achievement.