Skip to main content

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

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

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

Reading from paper compared to screens: A systematic review and meta‐analysis

Just finished reading an interesting study that was a meta-analysis of digital versus paper reading. The research done by Virginia Clinton ( https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/1467-9817.12269 ) concluded with: Reading from screens, such as tablets, smartphones and computers, has become ubiquitous for leisure, academic and work‐related reading. This review examined the literature on performance and two processes in reading text from screens and paper. There is legitimate concern that reading on paper may be better in terms of performance and efficiency. Future examination of key issues related to mind wandering, medium preference and contextual cues provided by medium will inform the practical implications of reading text from paper compared to screens. The study is well done and I wouldn't have any issues with her conclusions. Her study looked at  33 high-quality studies that tested students’ comprehension after they were randomly assigned to read on a screen o