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...

I find it interesting how many times I have discussions with others about what classifies as "reading". So many don't include other forms, such as audio although they get very hesitant when I ask about braille. I do understand that with print, such as you are reading now, it is the combination of the saccades and fixations to combine the elements into a whole word, and the words into sentences, and on and on. But if part of that "literacy" is the understanding, then listening to the words, or feeling the letters and words should also count. In one of my classes the students are required to "read" a book by listening. One good thing that I think that they experience is the struggle in "learning to read" as an adult. For most of us, learning to read occurred so long ago that you don't remember what it was like to learn that. Now as my students as adults are trying to read their audio book they talk about the fatigue they experiences through...

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...

With digital text the bookmark changes too. No longer is it the placeholder for where you stopped reading - they system will remember where you stopped and if you sync options are on, it should remember where you stopped reading that text on all your devices. Instead the bookmark is more like a flag - marking places in the text where you find something interesting that you might want to come back to. The bookmark will add a symbol or dog ear the page. This way when you are reviewing your chapter, you will know when you come to a page that you found important before and that you wanted to review or seek assistance for. One good way to use a bookmark is for something that can't be otherwise highlighted or noted, like an image. So for example you might find a good formula that is important, but in the text it is shown as an image. Here in the image above for example is the Combined Gas Law formula, but in the text it is an image, so it can't be highlighted by itself (althoug...

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 ...