Booktrack Classroom

Booktrack has become a Google for Education partner and is now offering a free Booktrack Classroom version for teachers. With booktracks you are trying to engage students more with the text by adding sound effects, music and other forms of audio to the material they're reading. Research on the concept has found that adding a soundtrack to text being read can increase comprehension and encourage students to read for longer periods. Teachers register for their free account and add a class, student names, and student password options. With your account, teachers and students log in and access an online text library with public domain books and chapters, you can also upload your own stories. Once a story is loading, you can add an audio track, by choosing the text and then specifying music by emotion, genre and style or sound effects.

When reading, the reader can adjust the volume, speed (or let the system figure it out by page turnings), the text size, spacing and background colors.

Adjusting the text display

Mouse hover over speed buttons

Playback settings

For myself, I believe that the sound effects do help focus attention, and by providing one system of music/sound, it is more likely to prevent the reader from using other music. I know that one issue I've seen is that if you are listening to music with words while reading text confusion can result.

https://www.booktrackclassroom.com/content/first-time-sign-in

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