eBook News

This map contains highly-rated books (selected by students) with stories set in Florida, use these books to boost interest in reading. FL Teen Book Map of Adolescent Literature

Ok, this is a bit off-topic, but I was just presenting about ebook accommodations at a science teacher convention and they wanted to know about some good "science books" that would work well for the classroom collection. I'm a strong believer of having classroom collections (real or virtual). There are lots of great books out there that people just don't realize. Too many people think of science books and then immediately go to the science textbook or some kind of field book (although those are great to have in the classroom too. If you are building a classroom collection for your high or middle school science classroom make sure to include a variety of books, not just non-fiction, but also picture books (think coffee table books), and fiction (that would include science fiction too). So here are some non-fiction books that I think are great to have in a collection.  Some great books on science that are not textbooks: The Science of Sci-Fi: From Warp Speed to Interste...

Ok, this has been an interesting kind of converse experiment, and an unintended one too. What had happened was this, I had a book that I had purchased, a paper printed book, that had been sitting on my shelf for quite a while that I started to read the other day. Now the resulting experience has been a surprise to me. I normally read over 100 books a year, but for at least the last four years none of the novels or other tradebooks that I've read has been on paper, instead they have all been through electronic means. Which does mean that I've become very comfortable with my ereader (usually my Kindle) as a method of reading.  And I know that more and more people are reading text from screens, but that includes things like google search results and email. Even my students have commented that once they start noticing much of what they read is on the screen, but for most of them pleasure reading is still something done with paper. As a proponent of differentiation I do try to get...

I do get so tired of seeing headlines like "Will Ebooks Ever Completely Replace Print?" I put such things up there with: Will Cars Ever Completely  Replace Horses? Will Microwaves Ever Completely Replace Stoves/Ovens? Will Color TV Ever Completely Replace Black & White? Will TV Ever Completely Replace Movie Theaters? Will Talkies Every Completely Replace Silent Movies? Will Cell/Smart Phones Ever Completely Replace Land Lines? Will Cloth Ever Completely Replace Animal Skins? Will Self-Driving Cars Completely Replace Standard Cars? I seriously doubt that anything ever gets completely replaced. I see it more like a half-life decay/reaction, things are changing and often by quite a bit, but in the end there is always a bit left of what you started with, it never seems to go to total change over. Horses still have jobs, black and white movies are still made, some people still use land lines, and some people still wear fur. With things like books, I think that...

The every other year about how 6-17 year old students just came out based on the Fall 2014 data. http://www.scholastic.com/readingreport/Scholastic-KidsAndFamilyReadingReport-5thEdition.pdf   Here are their big points about their findings: Kids & Reading  Half of all children ages 6–17 (51%) are currently reading a book for fun and another one in five (20%) just finished one.  Both parents of children ages 6–17 (71%) and kids (54%) rank strong reading skills as the most important skill a child should have. Yet while 86% of parents say reading books for fun is extremely or very important, only 46% of kids say the same.  Three-quarters of parents with children ages 6–17 (75%) agree “I wish my child would read more books for fun,” and 71% agree “I wish my child would do more things that did not involve screen time.”  What Makes Frequent Readers   Frequent readers, defined as children who read books for fun 5–7 days a week, differ subs...

The news today, as for the past weeks has big focus on ebola, and not to make light of such a deadly virus, but it does seem to be mostly news scaring and commentary, versus actual information. For most schools Flu is a more deadly situation as the CDC puts the average number of annual deaths in the United States somewhere between 3,000 and 49,000. But thinking about contagions and what I experienced as a middle and high school science teacher and certified school media specialist reminded me of a few more of the reasons that I do love ebooks. As an educator in a school you do see transfer, as the number of students sick with something grows and then declines (often effecting the teachers too) as the school is a microcosm of which I would see 150 a day (not counting lunch, hallway, and bus duty) out of a population of a few thousand .  A few years ago when I was a judge in a regional science fair I found a really interesting project done my a young girl. She had done a study of sc...