The chicken or the egg?

That caught your attention didn't it? as you scratch your head to fathom what I am going to write about it in this post?

I don't believe that many schools that are considering implementing e-books and e-readers have given enough thought to getting their teachers "experienced" first. In many of the presentations that I have given recently about e-books I have recommended that teachers/librarians/principals set up "proof of concept" projects where they invest in a few Kindles or iPads that they can then lend to staff or students to build that pool of experienced users.

I do believe that successful implementation of an e-book or e-textbook programme relies on a shared pool of expertise/experience. If a school or education system is going to go the considerable expense of kindles or iPads or another brand of e-readers then they need to be used in such a way as to invoke a greater level of productivity than the mere use of made-from-paper books do. Teachers need to be experienced enough to feel "converted" to their use, and to be able to build a bank of pedagogically sound practices.

Many are going into e-book and e-text book programmes on the assumption, largely false, that doing so will save money. They have in mind that e-books will be cheaper because they are digitised text, so we are saving ink and paper. But make no mistake, publishers need to get their money out of this venture too. And add to that the expense of whatever device you are going to use to display the e-books. They are not cheap either although prices are still coming down, for dedicated e-readers at least.  (here's a new Kindle-like device that has just come onto the market in Australia). So we shouldn't be adopting e-book programmes on economic grounds. It would be easy to prove that, in the immediate sense, staying with what we've got will be cheaper. We need to be implementing e-books because pedagogically it makes sense.

Posted via email from You Are Never Alone

Productive in the classroom with e-books

One of the topics I'd like to explore in the coming months is classroom productivity using e-books. As I've commented before, if all you are doing in your classroom with your e-reader or e-reading App is reading the book just as it if were made of paper, and ignoring all the productivity tools you have on your device, then you are not doing enough.

So what I'd really like to do is to collect some short descriptions of what teachers are doing in the classroom with e-books.

I suspect some northern hemisphere people, in the US in particular, have more tools attached to their e-book readers than we down under do, so I'd like to hear from you in particular.

One of the things I do on a regular basis is review books that I've read on my Kindle. You can see the resulatnt reviews on my crime fiction blog MYSTERIES IN PARADISE. So I'm including some of my tips for writing the reviews below.

Writing Book Reviews using the Kindle

• I highlight/bookmark memorable bits as I'm reading
• I write comments about passages or ideas that strike me as I'm reading - just highlight some text and then press the space bar to begin making your annotation.
• Your book marks and annotations are stored in a file called MyClippings. When you attach your Kindle to your computer, it shows up as an extra drive. Look for a file called MyClippings. This is a text file and the annotations etc for the book you are currently reading will be at the end of the file.
• I copy and paste the relevant parts of the MyClippings file into a new text file and then save it on my computer by the name of the book.
• Once you've saved the text file you can disconnect the Kindle from your computer and then on the Kindle use MENU>View my notes and highlights to check the passages in the e-book that the notes and highlights are connected to.
• From the text file you've saved, you can use highlighted passages in your review as quotes, and hopefully the notes you've made will jog your memory about things you wanted to discuss in your review.
• Sometimes the e-book also includes information about the author and other titles they have written. I often highlight that information and then use it in an "about author" section at the end of my review.
• You'll notice from my reviews on MYSTERIES IN PARADISE that I often use the image from the Amazon site, the product description, and the publisher's blurb in my review, but I always have a section where I talk about my impressions of the book.

So what can you tell me about or point me to?

Posted via email from You Are Never Alone

Amazon launching Kindle Library Lending

You've probably already caught up with the announcements by Overdrive and Amazon that they are collaborating on a Kindle ebook lending service.

The details are not very clear at the moment but it seems to me that it is simply an extension of Amazon's existing Kindle ebook lending service which allows those in the US who've bought Kindle e-books to lend them once. While the book is lent (for two weeks) the purchaser can't access it on their Kindle. The book can only be lent once, and it doesn't necessarily apply to all purchases - publishers need to give permission.

Crunch Gear has basically republished the media release word for word.

Not much joy here for non-US Kindle users though. Of course Amazon's Kindle e-book lending does not extend outside the US at the moment, so perhaps in the future...

 

Posted via email from You Are Never Alone

Most of us don't re-sell our books

One of the problems schools have struck in implementing e-textbooks relates to the re-sale model.

While in the "real", entertainment world, most of us don't want to re-sell the books that we buy, we often do hand them on. In schools though the textbook scenario often operates on one of two premises.

• individual students buy the text book, new or used, and then sell it on to the next year's cohort.
• the school purchases the books and then hands copies in various stages of "batterment" to students until they either fall apart or the school decides to invest in the latest version.

So a textbook that originally is quite expensive, say as much as $80 or even more, may be used over a period of 5 years bringing the actual cost per year down to $16.  There is no problem in handing the book on as you know, you just hand it over.

The problem with e-text books is that they are not designed to be handed on. Stringent DRM (Digital Rights Management) often prevents an e-book from being shifted from one device to another.

Even when there is no DRM in place, the format of the file (whether it is Kindle-compatible or epub) will often be an effective preventive measure.

However I have discerned what I think is another problem. It seems to me that many publishers of e-textbooks are seeing this format as a bit of a cash cow. The most "generous" offers that I have heard from Australian publishers is where a student will have the right to use the e-text book for 2 years, but that the price will be the same as for a paper version of the book. This flies in the face of what is happening in the entertainment market where e-books are very much lower than the paper euqivalents.

A call by the Washington Post for publishers to make e-books DRM free won't solve the transferability problem, but it is certainly a step in the right direction.

Posted via email from You Are Never Alone

On the lookout for e-book trials

That Australian educators and educational administrators are very interested in how e-books and e-readers might be incorporated into the implementation of the curriculum is being demonstrated by the number of invitations I am receiving to conferences and workshops to talk about e-book scenarios.

As a consequence I am constantly on the lookout for information about trials and projects in schools, in Australia in particular, with e-books, e-readers,  and e-text books. As 2011 progresses schools will be making decisions about budgets for 2012 and will be wanting to consider the experiences of others. I am interested in both formal reports and anecdotal ones, so if you are able to point me to anything I can get to on the web, leave a comment.

If you would like to email me about what is happening in your school (or leave a more public comment on this post), I do need a bit of "depth" in the description: what seems to be working, what isn't. What hurdles have you come across, what seems insurmountable, what are you planning for 2012?

Posted via email from You Are Never Alone

Will books ever die?

A tongue-in-cheek  article I discovered today Product Review: Will 'Paper' Replace E_readers starts

We were given some review samples of a new technology  called ‘paper’ earlier this week. Paper is a natural material that can be produced in bulk, relatively cheap, and some people think it will replace e-readers such as the iPad and Kindle.

There has been considerable publicity given to headlines like E-book sales surge at Amazon, with e-book sales first of all outstripping hard-cover books in the middle of last year, and, in the last quarter of 2010, outstripping paperback sales.

 

For every 100 paperbacks the company shifted, it sold 115 Kindle books.

We've also had a lot of publicity about the demise of a number of book stores, particularly specialist ones.

From where I stand though, I don't see made-from-paper books disappearing anytime soon, despite a growth in sales of e-readers in the last 9 months. In considering the Amazon statistics, it occurs to me that while I go to Amazon to purchase my e-books, I don't go there to buy either hardbacks or paperbacks. I get them at my local bookstore.

New research on UK eReader sales, from the Publishers Association. We already know that 2010 eBook sales accounted for just 0.4% of the UK book market. So what changed at Christmas? The Publishers Association polled 2,000 people recently, and found that 7% of British adults had some kind of eReader (smartphone, iPad or ereader) for Christmas.  source

There can be no doubt though that e-books are making their mark in the US, doubling from January 2010 to January 2011

I'm not sure that we are seeing the same here in Australia.

Trevor Cairney who blogs at Just in Case lists some good reasons why the book will survive.
He also lists some changes we will probably see in the publishing industry. 
Among them

• Scientific journals will cease to be produced in paper form within 5-10 years.
• Increasingly, authors will publish e-books themselves, creating major problems for publishers and even bookshops.
• Bookshops will only survive if they change to become places where lovers of books meet, chat, eat, share books (in whatever form) and purchase e-books and paper books as well as associated products. Some are already moving down this path.

The remainder in the list are worth checking.

 

Posted via email from You Are Never Alone

40 years of e-books

You might like to check the rest of the infographic above on TeleRead.

I hadn't realised until looking at that, that Project Gutenberg was that old, or that the digitized Declartion of Independence was the world's first e-book. You'll see also on the infographic that only 10 e-books were created on Project Gutenberg in the first 18 years, but that the Project has tripled output in the last eight years.

A number of factors have given the e-book project a real dynamic in the last 3 years.

I saw an e-book reader at Microsoft in 2001 but in today's terminology it was a real "brick" and didn't take off. Before the launch of Amazon's Kindle nobody could really take e-book readers seriously, and the only place you could read your Project Gutenberg e-book was on your computer, and even then it was often an unfriendly text file with peculiar line lengths.

With the advent of the Kindle came new technology and new features

• e-ink
• text sizing
• a new way of acquiring the books through wi-fi download
• text to voice
• lighter in weight and smaller in size than earlier e-readers

Some of the other technology that has made the e-book (and e-textbook) revolution possible has almost passed us by without notice because it is has been so bound up with what we have come to expect.

• faster computer processing
• larger capacity storage chips
• widespread uptake of wi-fi
• file size reduction - we tend to think of file sizes as being bigger than they were, but that is true only to a point - in fact the file sizes being used in pdf, mobi, and azw files is pretty small. While the photos you take on your camera are often pretty large (4 MB+), the digital images used in e-reading software are much smaller because of the file compression software being used

With the arrival of the iPad on the scene in the middle of last year, then the idea of viable tablets/ computers where one of the applications was an e-reader really took hold. Dedicated e-readers like the Kindle still have the upper hand in terms of battery life and basic cost. The 3G Kindle retails at $189, and it seems that the iPad2 costs nearly twice that to manufacture and retails at approximately 4 times that. These are serious issues for educational institutions, but already we have seen contenders who are promising much cheaper tablets. Prices for the iPad in Australia are all over the place.

So now it is really coming down to an issue of whether you are happy with a dedicated e-reader, or you want, and are prepared to pay for, a tool that can do a lot more. I'm not sure that those who say that consumers won't buy both are right. There are already examples of people who are buying both.

Last week, March 6-12, was read an e-book week. So a belated happy birthday e-books!

Posted via email from You Are Never Alone

iPad trials in Australia

2011 has seen the proliferation of iPad trials in Australian schools and Universities.

In most of these cased the iPad has been adopted as much for the Apps available as for its e-reading tools.

Here are some sites and reports to look at.

iPads for Learning: Victorian government:
This website is for educators who want to learn about using iPads in education. Here you will find
information about the Victorian school iPads for Learning trial including specially selected apps,
classroom ideas and technical tips. The 10 participating schools are diverse, including primary, secondary, Prep to Year 12 and specialist settings.

St Peter's College Adelaide
In the Senior School, 338 Years 11 and 12 boys have been provided with wireless iPads to support an eBook program. Licences have been obtained to supply all students with e-textbooks via personalised secure access. A user friendly interface, Keystone, has been developed. Users have the ability to download and purchase eBooks, upload and share their work and ideas.

Other schools trials:

• Queensland state schools: Throughout Semester 1, Kedron State High School and Doomadgee State School will explore the teaching, learning and business potential.
• At least five independent Sydney schools will trial iPads in select classes this year.
• Two schools in Singapore: A secondary school in Singapore, where the youngest students are aged 12, has spent S$135,000 ($100,000) to buy 150 iPads for 140 students and 10 teachers as part of this project.

In 2011 Adelaide University has given out iPads to to 750 students in first year science.

• announcement
• Media Release 2 Feb 2011
• FAQs
• Campus Review report
• University to develop its own set of resources

Other university trials

• RMIT
• Trinity College Melbourne pilot report - phase1 completed, a 6 months trial
  Report on the Step Forward iPad Pilot Project (you need to be able access Google Docs)
  blog: http://ipadpilot.wordpress.com/
• University of Kentucky begins an 18 month trial on an iPad curriculum.
  The University of Kentucky’s Patterson School of Diplomacy and International Commerce is working with Apple to run an 18-month trial in which students, faculty and staff will all use iPads to complete course work. The department will use iPads for everything from student recruitment, admissions, seminars, graduation, and classes. Apple is supporting the school throughout the trial, with things like program development and strategy, as well as training users. The goal of the project is to explore how to take advantage of the device in the classroom setting and to discover which applications work best for studying diplomacy and international commerce. In February, about 50 Patterson School students, faculty, and staff began using the iPad trial, and another 35 students will join the trial program once the 2011 students are chosen. The program will include both first and second-generation iPads.

Posted via email from You Are Never Alone

e-textbooks in schools: what do you need to think about?

Here in Australia school administrators and teachers are already beginning to think about next year.

In terms of converting over to e-textbooks for 2011 they've already missed the boat, but are beginning to think about what would be involved in implementation in 2012.

So what factors need to be considered?
The list below is by no means complete and you may like to suggest things to be added.

• are you happy with the text books that you have?
  Do you want to replace any of them? Source new ones?
• If you convert to e-textbooks what device will you deliver them on?
  netbooks, laptops, iPads, other table device
  What specs will the device need?
• who owns the device? will the school buy it and lend it out? or can the students get the text on a device of their choice?
• What sort of budget do you have?
  There is an impression that converting to e-textbooks will save money.
  Unfortunately that is not the way it is working at the moment.
  In general your e-textbook will cost approximately 50% to 70% of your made-from-paper one. You are basically leasing it and at some stage it will expire or self-destruct, probably at the end of the school year, but perhaps after 2 years.
• who will supply devices for the teachers? And how will you encourage them to explore the productivities that come with e-textbooks?
• Are you aware that your e-textbook has no resale value? And unless it actually comes originally as a CD that oyu own, then oyu won't be able to transfer it from one device to another because of restrictive DRM practices.

My advice:

• Talk to your current textbook suppliers, tell them you are interested in the e-text scenario, and ask them what they can do for you
• Talk directly to the publishers of your current text books and ask the same questions. Be sure to include questions about cost.
• Ask your teachers to look for alternatives to their current text books.

Posted via email from You Are Never Alone

Where do you get it? Calibre launches DRM free

calibre introduces Open Books, a site for easy browsing of DRM-free e-books (e-books without DRM) that are not in the public domain.

Open Books is a compilation non DRM e-books from various sources linked to enable readers to browse and download them.

So far the e-books are generally coming in via Smashwords, Closed Circle, BeWrite Books, and Carina Press. The cost for each e-book is fairly small, generally under $5, sometimes much less than that. The user is asked to abide by an "honesty" system that does not encourage piracy.

The e-books are generally available in .mobi (Kindle), epub and pdf.

For DRM-free public domain books visit the Project Gutenberg website. The Project Gutenberg catalogue contains public domain e-books free of cost as well as DRM-free in various languages.

One of the great pointers to e-books on the Project Gutenberg site is the Magic Catalog.

Amazon has a few DRM-free e-books. Look for "Simultaneous Device Usage" under "Product Details" and if it is set to "Unlimited" then the book is DRM-free.

Posted via email from You Are Never Alone

e-book management strategies for schools

One of the problems in managing e-book use in schools is that we are dealing with a number of scenarios as the top of this diagram indicates, and the solutions required, or possible, will vary.

The other is that the e-reading devices are not always owned by the school. The school may be providing devices for experiential reasons, or social/economic equity, but often you'll need to manage download to not only a variety of devices, involving 3 main formats (see yesterday's post), but also allow access to school resources to privately owned devices.

What I've tried to show in the bottom diagram Repositories are the solutions being attempted in Australian schools. It is a sort of tiered approach, although the elements run in parellel to each other,  and it is possible that not all 4 elements will be present. The Third Party Solutions for example may well be financially beyond the school as setting them up and then paying an annual licence fee are expensive. The Third Party Solutions won't replace the hard copy holdings of the school library, and if the school ends up with nothing to show for their spending on e-books, then higher authorities may not regard it as money well spent. The other thing with a Third Party Solution is that implementation in a school has to be accompanied by quite a high level of usage to present an economically valid argument. Anecdotal reports I have heard about implementation in public libraries for example have talked about an initial flurry of borrowing, then a slackening off, and the need to build up a clientele through pro-active measures.

Is your school doing something that doesn't fit this diagram? Or does it cover everything you are doing? I'd love to know. Leave a comment please.

Posted via email from You Are Never Alone

A classroom with e-books

There are logistical problems (page numbering, battery life, power, using text to voice) but they are not insurmountable.

Bigger problems are going to come from getting copies downloaded onto the various devices, but even those are solvable.

Some of my thinking is that the teacher will need to think the pedagogy through carefully. Each of these devices has its own set of distractions and disruptions.

My main question is, if the hard copy option exists, whether the students will learn to, or be encouraged to,  use the productivity tools that e-books and e-readers afford the user.

My fear is that one of the hard copies will be the teacher.

Posted via email from You Are Never Alone

Rate of change in the e-reading world

I'm building up to some e-book presentations in the next few weeks and beginning to assemble my thoughts.

I wrote an article on e-readers for teacher librarians and cataloguers which was published at the end of the year.

I began

2010 will be seen as the year of the advent of the e-book and the e-book reader. Toward the end of the year teachers and libraries worldwide, and in Australia, had begun pooling their experiences with the new devices, trying to wrap their heads around how e-books could be used in schools, and libraries in particular. The opportunities are enormous, but so are the challenges.

E-books and e-readers have become a topic of special interest to me, and it became obvious from responses to articles that I wrote, presentations that I delivered, and webinars and forums that I participated in, that it is of great interest to others as well.

I suspect that by the end of 2011 we may well have solved some of the challenges, and e-book use will be well-entrenched in our schools and our libraries. We may have to resign ourselves to the insolubility of the other challenges at least for the moment.

So now I'm trying to analyse what progress we've made since I wrote the article. One of the things I'm conscious of is that in a sense nothing has changed, and yet at the same time the rate of change has been huge.
I think by "nothing has changed" I mean that the overall issues are still there, particularly if you are talking about libraries lending e-books and schools issuing e-text books. The barriers still exist as do the management problems. If you have money, then there are solutions within reach, but they may not take you down the path you wanted to travel on.

On the other hand if you are talking about e-readers themselves then the rate of change is enormous. I have a Kindle2 and already Kindle3 has had an upgrade and my Kindle2 is obsolete, if you are talking in terms of the "improvements".
Mind you, a number of the improvements, as far as I can judge, have been cosmetic, and my Kindle2 still does what it always did, provides the service it always has. It seems a pity that Amazon has no intention now of upgrading the functionality of my Kindle2.

I'll witter on a bit more tomorrow...

Posted via email from You Are Never Alone

What is an e-book?

Searching out e-text book initiatives in Australian educational institutions, particularly schools, has led me to the conclusion that in some cases we are not using the same terminology and that there is a wide spectrum of what people mean by the term e-book, depending on where they are coming from.

I like this definition from Wikipedia:
An electronic book (also e-book, ebook, digital book) is a text and image-based publication in digital form produced on, published by, and readable on computers or other digital devices. Sometimes the equivalent of a conventional printed book, e-books can also be born digital. The Oxford Dictionary of English defines the e-book as "an electronic version of a printed book," but e-books can and do exist without any printed equivalent. E-books are usually read on dedicated hardware devices known as e-Readers or e-book devices. Personal computers and some cell phones can also be used to read e-books.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-book (check the link for further information)

What I like about that definition in particular is that it points out that an e-book is usually read on a dedicated device, and I would add to that, that the e-book can be read off-line.
In Australia where good bandwidth is still a pipe dream in some areas, this feature is really important. Anything else assumes that the device will have 3G connectivity rather than wireless.

It appears that some publishers are supplying what they call "e-book versions" of existing text-books on CD for installation onto netbooks or laptops. The cost is basically the same as a print version of the text, and in fact, in some cases they say they are throwing the CD in for "free", as a justification for charging the same.

Another the scenario is the one where the publisher is supplying a pdf of the text to the school at "half-price". They are supplying the school with a limited download (number of copies) of the pdf, and the school has agreed that the pdf will expire at the end of the academic year, and in the following year they will need to pay the same licence fee. Once again it does not seem to me that this is really an e-book. The responsibility for downloading the pdf to the student laptop/netbooks has been thrown on to the school and the netbooks require Adobe software for the e-books to be read.
Another version of this is the publisher supplying the school with a list of codes which enable the download of a pdf to an individual computer.
Where the publisher is supplying the pdfs at "half-price", they will recoup the profit margin on supplying the books over 2 years, and then continue to reap profit in ensuing years.  I can't see any ongoing costs for the publisher unless they are promising to update the e-book on an annual basis.

Here are my calculations:

Scenario 1: continue to buy paper books
The school buys 200 copies of a paper text book at $60 per book - the cost is $12,000
Under normal circumstances these text books will last 4-5 years.
If 4 years, the cost is $3,000
 
Scenario 2: embark on the e-book scheme
Year 1: Buy 200 "digital versions" @ $30 = $6,000
Year 2: Buy 200 "digital versions" @ $30 = $6,000
At the end of this period the school has nothing to show for $12,000, no books to hand on, no stocks on the shelves.
They will continue to pay $6000 a year for the scheme.
At the end of 4 years the cost has been $24,000

The other e-book scenario that is beginning to emerge is the "cloud computing" one where the e-book is supplied online and is never downloaded to the device.
The recipient's "library" is admittedly always available online but again this scenario assumes "always-on" connectivity and good to high bandwidth.

What are your thoughts?

Posted via email from You Are Never Alone

e-books in classrooms

I'm looking for a bit of feedback with this post.

There have been a number of newspaper articles now about schools, particularly in the USA, taking delivery of e-book readers, in the main Kindles. But I haven't seen much in the way of post-adoption reporting.

Here are just a couple of the articles:

In September 2010 ClearWater High School in Tampa Bay distributed 2,100 Kindles (spending roughly $600K) to students and teachers.

• http://www.teleread.com/paul-biba/clearwater-high-school-in-florida-will-ditch-textbooks-for-all-students-and-go-to-kindles/
• http://www.tampabay.com/news/education/k12/textbooks-ditched-at-clearwater-high-as-students-log-on-to-kindles/1099264
• http://thenextweb.com/us/2010/09/18/us-school-replaces-textbooks-with-kindles-students-go-crazy/

Nashua High School in Arkansas is using 200 Kindles in English classes in hopes that it’ll be possible to use them in other subject-areas as a replacement for paper textbooks. article.

So far, the adoption of Kindles or any other e-reader in Australian classrooms seems to be minimal.
But I could be wrong. Maybe I am just listening to the wrong grapevines.

What I'd like from you, if you come across this post, is some more evidence of usage (anywhere).
In particular I'd like to hear about some post-adoption reports, that help me answer questions like these.

• how are the teachers using the e-books & e-readers in the classroom?
• what devices have they decided to use? Did they have to change their original plan?
• Is the pedagogy different? What stumbling blocks have there been?
• Is it working out cheaper for the school to use e-books?
• specific details - are the e-books they are using supplied by a publisher? What are the terms and conditions? How are they distributed? Do they expire after the academic year?

I came across an article today related to a proposal by the Florida State Board of Education to transfer over to digital textbooks by 2014.
The writer gives many good points supporting the move:

• they will replace heavy books
• And e-books will make it less expensive than ever before; many of the classics on reading lists, for example, can be downloaded for free.
• In addition, e-books have the potential for other broad, interactive uses in the classroom.
• Most important, students gain access to books they never would have before.
• Finally, being electronic, and therefore intriguing, young people might become more interested in reading, and learning.

But, the writer says, there are some questions that need to be answered:

• how will the students acquire the books, and who will pay
• will using e-books affect the way text books are chosen
• will the system of state-wide (in Florida) use of the same texts still continue?
• will teachers be given the freedom to choose their own e-texts

The writer concludes:

The transition will be an expensive one, but well worth the investment and effort as long as we do our homework and base our decisions on thoughtful research as opposed to over-excitement.

What do you think?

Posted via email from You Are Never Alone

Educators: taking advantage of e-reader capability

Using e-readers in the classroom should prompt some pedagogical changes.
Reading a book with an e-reader or e-reading software/App is not just the digital equivalent of reading a made-from-paper book. It opens up a whole world of possibilities, student engagement, and, at the next level, of creativity.

Most teachers will be familiar with the first level of possibilities:

• text re-sizing
• dictionary/thesaurus
• portability and the potential of carrying a very large number of books on a single device
• animation and interaction if you are using an App
• search function that enables the user to search the book for specific text - e.g. to check up on the first time a particular character appears and so on
• text to speech synthesis - usually a "computer" voice but sometimes still useful

There are tools that the user can use which both personalise the device, or, if it needs to be shared, enable more streamlined use. (Here I will refer mainly to the Kindle because that's where my area of "expertise" lies, but perhaps you could adopt the approach of "if that can be done on a Kindle, how can I achieve something similar on my e-reader?)

• tools like Categories in the Kindle enable the user to put the e-books into a sort of "folder" system. In this blog post I explain what I've done on my Kindle, but you could easily use categories on a shared device to store books for specific users. I would imagine that other devices/software have the ability to sort books into labelled shelves. (if you know of anything here, leave a comment)

But there are tools that allow the user to take use of their device to a new level. Let's take the scenario of a student who is required to write a book report, or an analysis of a particular section.
The student may need to be shown how to use the bookmarking and annotation tool, how to transfer those notes to a text reader on a computer, and then to manipulate them for a book report.

My point here is that the teacher needs to take a bit of an interventionist role, set post-reading assignments that challenge the student to make use of the extra capabilities an e-reader provides.

If you have a Kindle, you might find EduKindle a useful place to browse and monitor.
Of course there is always the Kindle User's Guide.

Posted via email from You Are Never Alone

Seducing our students with e-readers

It seems that many students can be turned off reading by the physical characteristics of made-from-paper books, like

• size of the font - we expect them to "graduate" to smaller type fonts before they (or is it their eyes?) are ready
• page layout - not enough white space, print density, no pictures
• the size of the book - too small, too big
• the weight of the book

One of the interesting things emerging from discussions about e-reading experiences is that it seems people who already read a lot are reading even more. Here is an article that explores that theme.

All of this is the fault of my ereading device. Like the muses of ancient lore, the device has seduced me. I can’t wait to sit in my recliner and read on my Sony 950; I simply do not want to pick up a printed book. The screen is easy on my eyes, the touch screen a pleasure, the ergonomics excellent for me, and the weight significantly less than most of my hardcovers. It oozes pleasure and an enjoyable time to be had. ... I’m reading three to four times as many books as I did before I had an ereading device

Perhaps that ties in with what I touched on yesterday: the impression that they are able to read faster.

Amazon for example are citing rising books sales, particularly of e-books.

Of course in education it isn't really the established older readers we want to get to. It is the younger readers who in the past have been turned off reading for reasons like those I cited at the beginning of this post.

And the jury is out on whether these people need a dedicated e-reader or an App on an iPad or e-reading software on their computer

Posted via email from You Are Never Alone

Can we make things too easy to read?

Anecdotal evidence from friends and comments about their e-reading experiences include an impressions that they are able to read faster on their e-readers than they can with a "normal" made-from-paper book. We have all thought that had something to do with the ability to manipulate the size of the font.

This phenomenon has been noted elsewhere, for example, a study of US middle school students who were all using Kindles, where their teacher found that nearly all were choosing to read their e-books in one of the larger size fonts.

Again this is anecdotal "evidence" - but there have been suggestions made that e-books are abridged versions - people unable to believe that they were able to read the book so quickly!

A colleague borrowed the company Kindle for the holidays and got on famously with it, far better than she thought she would. She said that she quickly forgot it was a device and settled down to reading with it easily. She read 3 books, all fairly long. However the time came to return the device and she reported that she had made the transition back to p-books just as easily.
She reported having a strange experience. The print on the p-book was a bit small and so she thought she would "bump it up bit", until she remembered she was not reading it on an e-reader.

So this post from TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home, a blog that I follow regularly, Are e-readers too easy to read? makes interesting reading. A neuroscience blogger suggests that easy to read fonts interfere with information retention. I guess if that were an educationally sound conclusion, then we would have made our readers and text books much harder to read long ago.

What do you think?

Posted via email from You Are Never Alone (on posterous)

Teachers and librarians lead the way with e-books

New Research Report Just Released
eBooks:  K-12 Educators’ Usage and Attitudes

 

A new research report has just been released that surveys teachers and librarians to find out how they are using e-books—personally and in the classroom—and to identify purchasing usage, attitudes, and trends.  

The report presents the results of a survey conducted among 700 teachers and 600 school librarians in the US.

The survey shows that school librarians are leading the way in bringing e-books into our nation’s schools – in large part because they have funding available to support their E-book purchases. The top-line results show that 40% of K-12 teachers and 50% of school librarians have purchased E-books for either personal or professional use.

The survey was conducted by educational consulting firm Egremont Associates, with support from co-sponsors edWeb.net, MCH Strategic Data, and TecKnoQuest Inc.

Points from the survey results:

• educators who have not already jumped on the bandwagon appear to be unlikely to do so in the near future.
• 70% are paying for eBooks out of their own pocket.
• School librarians are more involved with eBooks than teachers - partly because their eBook purchases are more likely than teachers.
• most popular foramts of books purchased are .pdf or .azw (Kindle)
• if educators own an eBook reader it is most likely to be a Kindle

Join Exploring eBooks for K-12 on Edweb Net and download the executive summary free.

Posted via email from You Are Never Alone (on posterous)

E-books in education in 2011

One interesting report that has come my way is the Price Waterhouse Coopers report on ebooks, published at the end of 2010.

While it is not specifically related to education, it does give a good overview for those who haven't yet begun thinking about e-readers and e-books. It contains some very persuasive arguments for why teachers and librarians need to try eReaders and eBooks. It is the way the world is headed.

It compares data from from the US, UK, Germany and the Netherlands (what a pocket of resistance that seems to be)

I was particularly interested in the final pages which described the Situation in the Year 2015. (check page 32 onwards)

Here are the main points:

• Books will still be printed. Books made from paper are not going to become museum pieces any time soon. However the book industry will be transformed by eBooks and eReaders.
• Printed books will continue to account for the majority of sales. At the end of 2010 eBooks accounted for only 7% of the US market and much less elsewhere.
• Prices for eReaders will fall.
• Colour screens and Internet connectivity will become commonplace.
• eReaders will remain less expensive than tablets and have fewer "disruptive" features.
• Dedicated eReaders will continue to be more popular than tablets, although the sales will flatten out where they are already established.
• Tablets will be lighter and have longer battery life than currently.
• Tablets will gradually take the place of printed magazines and newspapers.
• More publishers will offer multimedia content in eBooks.
• "special interest books" will be sold on a chapter by chapter basis (this has interesting implications for text books)
• Cook books and Travel guides and other special interest books will be offered as tablet Apps, and also with interactive feautres, online updates, and subscriptions
• Libraries will be lending both eReaders and eBooks
• As demand decreases for print books some titles may no longer be available in print, although printing on demand may still happen.
• By the end of 2012 most avid readers (in the US at least) will own an eReader.
• The eBooks market share in the US will be 22.5% in 2015. In the UK it will be 14% in 2015, and in Germany 6% and in the Netherlands 4%
• Closures of physical bookstores so far have probably had more to do with the economic downturn than with the rise of eBooks. Physical bookstores will need to look at the services they offer in order to ensure survival.

Posted via email from You Are Never Alone (on posterous)