Week 9: Thing 22

e-books. There's something that I just love about picking out a book based on its cover that keeps me at bay from Kindle's and the like. It will be a while before I can transition to using ebooks on the go. However, their application in the classroom is great. Any book, poem, or short story that I teach and is available in the public domain is linked to my website. This way students can read their nightly assignments from home without a textbook.

I've had this available since I started teaching, but I'm still not confident in the ability to go completely without textbooks. There is still information (historical background, terms, author background) that isn't consolidated in one place. Perhaps through the use of tools like wikipedia, I can design ways to bring this information into one place for students to access once we move toward a more paperless classroom. The major downfall of ebooks (as far as simply Read Only technology) is the ability to make notations in the book. However, tools like Kindle are allowing for such additions to create a more vitural reading and interactive experience.

One place that ebooks have been particularly helpful is in our reading of Huck Finn. loudlit.org has a chapter by chapter function that allows students to read the text on the screen while listening to an audio recording of the text. They can also download the audio to their ipods for listening anytime/anywhere. This is a great asset to students who struggle with reading and reading comprehension.

Project Gutenburg and Librivox are two great assets to this ebook community. They are allowing for web 2.0 sharing (librivox allows users to record public domain literature for sharing) and a comprehensive "go to" site for online books (i.e. Gutenburg). As ebook readers become more prevelant, it will allow users to access public domain books for free use on their portable devices. This means classics, long in print, can be accessed by anyone anywhere anytime for free.

Another great source of ebooks (if you're into them) are through the Memphis Public Library. It's been a while since I looked, but I believe they have many audio recordings (and possibly ebooks) for sale for about 5$ each. Of course sources like Amazon are quickly making non-print books easy to find, cheap, and accessible.

While I'm not ready to pick up an electronic device to replace flipping through a book, I do think that there is a lot that can be done with showing students where and how to find books online for class and personal use.

As a footnote: I looked at the "World Library Fair" website. It seems rather useless. Go to Gutenburg directly if you need something. Most of the links it sent me to were dead and it is a very difficult site to navigate. Learn to use your normal search engines to find things. For instance, type in "Tom Sawyer" + "Full Text" to get a full text version or add + "Audio" to get an audio recording. Otherwise, Gutenburg seems to be the most comprehensive site for locating full text materials.

Good sites:
loudlit.org
librivox.org
gutenburg.org