Digital Books For Classroom Use
July 8, 2021 1:41 AM Subscribe
I work with special education students with significant cognitive disabilities. I want us to do book-reading activities together, and I would like to do digital books but not sure of the options.
I want to have the books up on the Smartboard, so that all the students (around 8) can see the pages at once instead of me having to hold a physical book. We will be using children's picture books if that matters. Would buying kindle books work? Can I access those on a windows computer?
Additional Notes
-I'm not a teacher but work in a related field
-I will be purchasing with my personal funds
-Windows computers exclusively (running windows 10)
-If I would need to download a program to access the material I'll need to get permission from my school district but don't anticipate any big issues there
-I also have an iPad though so a bonus if I could access content on there too when doing follow-up smaller group activities
I want to have the books up on the Smartboard, so that all the students (around 8) can see the pages at once instead of me having to hold a physical book. We will be using children's picture books if that matters. Would buying kindle books work? Can I access those on a windows computer?
Additional Notes
-I'm not a teacher but work in a related field
-I will be purchasing with my personal funds
-Windows computers exclusively (running windows 10)
-If I would need to download a program to access the material I'll need to get permission from my school district but don't anticipate any big issues there
-I also have an iPad though so a bonus if I could access content on there too when doing follow-up smaller group activities
If you could accomplish all you wanted to accomplish, but with physical books, would you?
I would buy a document camera like this one (which I have, and am quite happy with), and just project your books via it up onto your smartboard.
Technically, it's the path of least resistance, because your IT folks don't have to do much, if anything, to enable or support it. And you're not dealing with DRM, or ebook readers, etc.
Logistically, it will also be much, much easier for you to find physical books than ebooks (doubly so for children's picture books), as well as to accept donations of books from others.
posted by NotMyselfRightNow at 4:30 AM on July 8, 2021 [1 favorite]
I would buy a document camera like this one (which I have, and am quite happy with), and just project your books via it up onto your smartboard.
Technically, it's the path of least resistance, because your IT folks don't have to do much, if anything, to enable or support it. And you're not dealing with DRM, or ebook readers, etc.
Logistically, it will also be much, much easier for you to find physical books than ebooks (doubly so for children's picture books), as well as to accept donations of books from others.
posted by NotMyselfRightNow at 4:30 AM on July 8, 2021 [1 favorite]
Agreed on the document camera. You will have SO many more options if you can use physical books and far fewer points where the technology can fail.
posted by corey flood at 6:03 AM on July 8, 2021
posted by corey flood at 6:03 AM on July 8, 2021
Rights for ebooks are not cheap, so projecting 1 book for class use makes sense.
posted by theora55 at 7:59 AM on July 8, 2021
posted by theora55 at 7:59 AM on July 8, 2021
Sorry if this sounds Pepsi Blue-ish but if any of your students have print disabilities (this can mean a wide range of things that mean they have trouble reading print materials, from vision to cognitive issues) you can get PDFs of many older children's books for free from the Internet Archive. They have a form you fill out and then you can access a large number of items in their print disabled collection. The books come with DRM on them but if you're in this program you can ask to have a copy of the item made available without it. This means you can just load it into a PDF reader on your laptop and project it.
Feel free to DM me for more details, I'm the one that administers that part of the program.
posted by jessamyn at 8:13 AM on July 8, 2021
Feel free to DM me for more details, I'm the one that administers that part of the program.
posted by jessamyn at 8:13 AM on July 8, 2021
You might also want to know about the International Children's Digital Library which has many books available for free on their website.
posted by jessamyn at 8:15 AM on July 8, 2021
posted by jessamyn at 8:15 AM on July 8, 2021
This thread is closed to new comments.
posted by Nickel at 2:44 AM on July 8, 2021