eBook News

Large print books have been found to be really helpful in so many ways. Below are some of the results of a study about large print. A problem with large print books (on paper) is that there are so few printed, many of the publishers still think of them for "older" readers. One solution for this though is if you or your school have ereaders to read the books you want, then use the settings or font functions of the ereader to change to a larger print. Please take the time to change from the default that you got with your ebook reader and try some different font, it can make an amazing difference with your reading. Researchers have found a correlation between large print books and assessment results. findings include: 61% of elementary school students said they remembered characters and plots better when reading large print books. 48% of high school students said they read more outside of school after experiencing large print books. Middle school students reported ...

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...

This last semester I was teaching a graduate technology and literacy course. As part of that course all my students were to do some action research. We did get some great results, for example  one student’s work on using refreshable braille display for elementary children which saw an improved fluency of 4-5 letters per minute over those just using embossed paper, and another student I was working with developed her project on guided writing, saw an overall writing increase of 50% in just a few weeks using Google Docs as a writing system tool. The one though that I wanted to talk about here though was one student who was doing his action research on himself, to try and get better at reading from an ebook. He does great with paper, but found that he had trouble focusing with reading with technology. In his final report he had a number of things that he found that are of interest: "During this process I learned that I read materials online a lot more then I originally thought. I...