ebooks and motivation

As a classroom teacher I used to use just about anything I could (within reason) to get my students motivated in what they were to be learning that day. From interesting stories, hands on labs, fun demonstrations, and stuff like that I would integrate them if they helped motivate my student in their learning. Once I had students who use to go off-roading on the weekends, so when teaching vectors, I didn't just show them in class, we went outside, got a sample truck, then using rope and two of the small girls from class, proceeded to use vector strategies to start pulling the truck, the students were amazed and then were motivated to learn how vectors worked. If technology can help motivate students to get into the practice and then love of reading, then use any and all technology available. I feel today that it was the books that I read as a child, that love of reading and reading as much as I could from books that I liked that enabled me to get to where I am today. Yes, for some students they will want to use the ebook device and a new toy, but play and toys can be effective learning tools, so as long as it gets them to read more, go for it. To me it doesn't matter if it electronic or print, as long as it gets them started and motivated to read, and read, and read

Can e-books motivate students to read more?
An Arizona elementary school is testing a new type of book club that aims to encourage students to read more by using electronic books. The Nook Club allows sixth-grade students to use the e-reader for two weeks. One school librarian said the e-readers are not expected to replace traditional books but could help motivate students to read more. The Arizona Republic (Phoenix) (3/27)

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Ebooks as Textbooks - Part 2 - Highlighting

Highlighting can be a very effective tool in reading and learning no matter the kind of text being read: from novels to textbooks. Most textbooks or other forms of information text will usually used text features along with graphics to help organize information presented in the text. These elements are done to help focus attention on important or key concepts and provide additional information. The text organization itself can include structural elements such as heading, subheading, index, glossary, paragraph spacing, bulleted or numbered lists, sidebars or side boxes, italics, underlines or bold for words or even sections. Graphic content can include the use of symbols, colors, illustrations, pictures, diagrams, charts, and graphs. Poor highlighting design - too much text has been highlighted. The act of highlighting is less time consuming and much easier than note-taking ( to be discussed in an upcoming posting). To be effective in highlighting it should be a kind of meta

Ebooks as Textbooks Part 8: Textbook structure

Textbooks usually have a structure, and it doesn't matter if it is an electronic textbook or a paper printed one, the people who put the textbook together usually make it have a structure to help you better understand what you are reading and learning. Textbooks are usually a type of text known as informational or expository text - this is text written to inform, and can be things like textbook chapters, newspaper and magazine articles, and other reference materials like encyclopedia items. The other kind of text that you usually encounter in school is narrative text, where a story is being told - which could be fictional or non-fiction. And while textbooks are informational text, many will also have narrative text, usually as stories to help you better understand the concept, although in an English or literature class the stories are often more the focus of the learning. Textbook Elements With an electronic textbook it might be hard to see the structure, because you cant riffle

Auto Summarization

In dealing with textbooks and students with disabilities, one of the most common things that we would do is to get the textbook in a digital format, as an ebook. By doing this we were able to use a number of tools based on the need of the student. I've had students who could not lift their physical printed textbook, but would be able to access though a laptop installed in their electronic wheelchair, for students with vision issues we could boost the font size or use a text-to-speech tool to have the book read aloud to them. One tool that I used with a number of my students who had issues was the Auto Summarize tool in Word. The tool works well with textbook, but wouldn't work for other texts, such as novels. I used this to reduce the amount of text that they had to read, the "cognitive load" of the text, but would still enable be able to get the information. Word did a great job, and depending on the student I would reduce the text to about 66% for facts and support

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