eBook News

Just heard from one of my publishers that my Ebooks for Elementary School books will be out soon. It is a combination reference, tutorial, and strategy guide will help all teachers and school librarians to effectively use the reading applications described, regardless of the classroom computing platform. eBooks offer students as well as teachers, school and public librarians, and parents tremendous possibilities. This book explains how to expand and enhance the reading experience through the use of technology. Today, eBooks are everywhere, and the use of digital learning materials is beginning to supplant traditional printed materials. As the world shifts to digital books, both teachers and students need to be comfortable and effective using materials in this format. This book helps you to apply eBook materials to existing curricula to create interactive educational activities and have access to more materials to support reading instruction, literacy, standards, and reading in the co...

I realize how adaptable tablets and computers are and how much that they can do, but there are still reasons to use an eink device with your schools and textbooks. One big reason in the classroom would be battery life, that month on a charge ensures that the device will be working and then also if a students does stop it won't be all of them. For tablets, my worry about power would be for the teacher at the end of the day, if the students have been movie watching during lunch it could be quite possible for a good number of them to be it of charge by the end of the day. Then there is reading itself. There have been studies that have shown that reading with eink shows the same effects in the brain as reading from paper, but tablets are different, not necessarily bad, just different. Then too, that power issue come up again for extended reading, think an hour at a time. We want students to get into flow and close reading, and eink devices are good for that. Eink devices like the kindl...

The process of taking notes, makes reading that much more of an active process and will aid in comprehension and retention. The addition of your own personal notes are usually easier to understand and remember than textbook material. As a student reads the textbook, he or she may not remember all of that they read when they have finished - this is especially true of very dense texts. But, if a student reads the information and also writes down notes about what he or she is reading at the same time, then that extra step reinforces that information and improves retention. So one of the best ways to retain information you are reading it is to take notes while you are actually reading it, for print books these notes were usually written in the margins of the text and so were called margin notes.  The taking of margin notes is a strategy that focuses your attention on important information from the textbook, novels, or articles that you are reading. Because it involves ...

Usually with reading textbooks people think about things like reading comprehension, where students are able to remember (recall) or understand the portions of the chapter being read. But textbooks also involve a different type of reading or literacy that of finding information within a passage - Searching. When searching, instead reading and understanding the entire text, the goal is to find a specific word, sentence, or information within a passage or chapter, or even an entire book. One of the big differences about reading ebooks is how it is possible to search within your text. In a print book when you are looking for something you have to skim and hope that you find the word that you were looking for. This can be a difficult process for some, as you may be trying to remember the location where you read it before (even harder if you haven't read that text yet) or if you have any kind of print disability then it can get even harder. You scan or skim to locate a single fact or...

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 th...

Tis the season, and perhaps you have been thinking about either getting that teacher a present, or perhaps you are considering that the end of the year is rapidly approaching and you wanted to make a classroom contribution (taxes you know). Have you considered donating books to a classroom though ebook donations. If a school or classroom is already using an ebook device, like the Kindle, Nook, or Sony (and others), it is possible to either purchase specific books for others or purchase an ebook gift card that can be used to purchase additional books for the classroom device. So, if you are thinking about getting something for that teacher, classroom, or school library, and you are not sure just what book that they may need or want, and there is an e-reading device that they are using - consider giving that teacher, classroom or school an electronic book or ebook gift cards. Amazon Kindle Cards Nook Gift Cards Sony eBook Store Gift Card

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