Skip to main content

Ebooks as Textbooks Part 7 - Bookmarking

With digital text the bookmark changes too. No longer is it the placeholder for where you stopped reading - they system will remember where you stopped and if you sync options are on, it should remember where you stopped reading that text on all your devices. Instead the bookmark is more like a flag - marking places in the text where you find something interesting that you might want to come back to. The bookmark will add a symbol or dog ear the page. This way when you are reviewing your chapter, you will know when you come to a page that you found important before and that you wanted to review or seek assistance for.



One good way to use a bookmark is for something that can't be otherwise highlighted or noted, like an image. So for example you might find a good formula that is important, but in the text it is shown as an image. Here in the image above for example is the Combined Gas Law formula, but in the text it is an image, so it can't be highlighted by itself (although you can highlight from before to after to have it included), nor can you use it as the focus for a note. Instead you can bookmark the page to come back to it, knowing you have added it as an important page. One possible issue though when using bookmarks is about text size. If you change the displayed font size the page content will change. The page capture above and below use the same book mark, but notice that the picture below doesn't actually contain the combined gas law formula image that is in the one above.



You could also use bookmarking for other books that you are reading for school, such as novels or plays, where there is important information about those pages that you wanted to come back to or discuss with others, but didn't want to take the time right now to highlight or add notes, interrupting your reading flow.  To avoid the interruption you could bookmark the pages (flagging them) to come back to them later or when you are in your discussion group.  For example you could be reading a section of a book or play and think that this page could have good content for foreshadowing or setting, but there may be something better later. So you bookmark the page and continue reading, then when you get to the end of the chapter or section, you would go back over your bookmarks deciding on which to keep and then adding annotations to the text by highlighting portions or selecting elements to add notes to about what you were looking for.

Comments

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...

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 ...

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...