Today’s adventure began with a few false starts looking for content in Tagalog and then Basque. I finally landed on a goldmine of a site in Polish called Epodreczniki, with an impressive set of interactive open textbooks and materials for primary and secondary levels (62 e-textbooks for 14 subjects according the site). Importantly, the site states:

All content created for e-textbooks will be published under a free Creative Commons license. We strive to facilitate the use of e-textbooks for children and teachers with disabilities, we create facilities. We are preparing translators for printing in Braille.

(If you are short on time, it’s worth reading the About page to learn more about this impressive project.)

Each level covers a familiar set of subjects for that level such as Biology, Math, Chemistry, Polish Language, History etc.  So where to begin when there is so much to explore? Since my kids are in Grade 4/5, I jumped to a History text for that grade.  If you want to appreciate how well designed these books are, make sure you turn on your Chrome Google Translate, which does a fantastic job of Polish-English translation.  The first observation I have about the content on the site is how visually pleasing the books are, in addition to being well designed from a pedagogical perspective.  Other than the fact that the site seemed to load quite slowly, the platform is very H5P meets Pressbooks, with a download feature as well.

A good place to start is with the table of contents for the Grade 4 History and Society textbook. Once you dive into the sections, you’ll notice that the text includes all the features you’d expect in an interactive textbook – reflection and review questions,  interactive activities, videos and images.  For example, the section on Medieval Knights has a great interactive on how medieval knights were dressed and armed .

For those learning Polish, there a various level of Polish language books and many of the videos and interactives would also be a great way to learn Polish – this example has an audio and text feature.

This is high quality stuff, and is pretty much ready to go for reuse with a bit of translation.