eBook News

 Good reading is always more than just putting the letters together to make words. You need to read for comprehension, fluency, learning, association, and more. One strategy that helps new or struggling readers is Reading While Listening, that is where the reader silently reads while someone else reads aloud. The research available consistently demonstrates its favorable contribution to improving reading fluency. Since improving fluency is an instructional goal of elementary schools, we should always be on the lookout for tools that can assist in improving reading fluency.  Children who are reluctant to read or who have low rates of fluency can benefit from hearing a text read aloud while they follow in a print version. When they are able to hear the words and phrases, they increase their speed and prosody (intonation) appropriate to the material being read, and are able to identify more words. In this case, though, I not thinking of reading silently. Fluency is defined a...

 Was just talking to a friend in China about how her classes were working out during COVID-19. One issue that she said that she was having dealt with the students' textbooks. When they were sent home before the next semester they didn't have their textbooks for their new classes, and what with Emergency Remote Teaching (ERT) there, all her students were online. The problem was that package delivery had been paused. Very different from here where Amazon broke sales records, and I saw their prime trucks everyday. To help her students she uploaded ebooks into their distance learning environment in order to help her students get their textbooks and keep up with the course instruction.  So if you are teaching ERT you might want to consider adding some public domain texts or ones that have been released under the Creative Commons license and get some books to your students.  I have three that you are welcome to use. I wrote a textbook titled Florida Science: The Science that ma...