Skip to main content

Storm Reading


As someone who has lived either next to or in the Caribbean basin most of my life (and taught science), I'm well acquainted with the effects of storms as they occur and the power loss aftermath. Whenever my power has gone out for an extended period of time I've always loved that my book collection is still right there to entertain or to teach me. This is still one of the great things about my e-ink readers over my LCD readers (like my iPad). The fact that I can read for over a month on a charge will usually take me through any power problems that I'm dealing with and since I can still buy books with my Kindle using the cell tower network, means I'm not limited to books that I've already read.

Even more though than the lack of power issue, I love my eink reader for when I travel. It used to be that I would have to pack a good number of books for a trip, once to read in the car or plane getting there and coming back, and some to read while relaxing at where ever I was going. But with my ereader now, the only time I can't use it is when the plain is taking off or landing. One recent trip that I made was to work on a project in the Dominican Republic, up in a village in the mountains near the Haiti border. There power was often out, but with my ereader I was able to read when I had time, along with adding notes about what I was reading. I've even converted student papers so that I could review and comment on them and then compile my comments to send back to my students. Doing all that on a single charge over the two weeks I was there.

So if you are a reader who reads lots of books, you may have already discovered the joy of carrying not only the book you are reading, but also a good number more, and being able to read for weeks on a charge, no matter the weather or if the power is on or off.

e-Reading After a Hurricane
Good E-Reader (blog)
So how does someone who is an ebook freak get along during a prolonged power outage? I wondered this myself, and I offer my conclusions. What I learned is applicable to any disaster. During most of the outage it was cold and the house got down to about ...
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

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...
7 comments
Read more

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 ...
1 comment
Read more

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...
Post a Comment
Read more