Read an E-Book - Research an Ebook

It's just a few short weeks till the annual Read an eBook week (March 3-9). This will be the 11th year of the ebook celebration and I encourage everyone to participate (in Canada it is Ebook Month). During that week there will be lots of free books from a variety of great resources- Visit http://www.ebookweek.com/index.html for more information.

As a side note, but one that leads well to the ebook week concept is that this year again I was judging at my regional science fair and noticed some developing trends. Over the last few year the reading science projects included projects such as the can you read with jumbled letters, a wonder study on virus on book covers, and a neat programming project that analyzed text to figure out the author, but this year (2013) there were two studies on ebook devices and reading. One study focused on a single device, with the other used an online textbook, and both were looking at the reading results through assessment. While neither of the studies found significant gains from using the device, it was great to see that they had become part of the K12 student research community.

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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

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

Art Project - adding ebooks to art

I'm beginning a new project to update some classic art that involves books to incorporate ebooks. Here are the first two that I have gotten done so far: Jean-Hanore Fragonard's A Young Girl Reading (a Sony Ebook) John Singer Sargent - Simplon Pass Reading (a Nook Color), 1911

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