Tuesday, March 08, 2011

Kindles in the Classroom Webinar

I joined the Kindles in the Classroom Webinar tonight to hear the moderator Will @ eReadia discuss what is helpful when using Kindles and other ereaders in the classroom. It seems that the most difficult problem is to get your students focused on the same passage for discussion.  What is helpful is for the teacher to embed the teaching notes for the text you are using by selecting and highlighting passages for easy reference. Some teachers use a doc camera to supplement teaching notes to make it easier for students to follow along. Will referred to the excellent Kindle resources shared by Buffy Hamilton on her web presences.  Kindle page numbers are supposed to help with this but they are not available as yet for all books.  One participant suggested that it helps to have students set all settings the same, such as font size.  Another problem is that many books teachers use are not yet available on Kindle. Teachers may have to consider using Open Source textbooks; this is another obstacle which involves changing to a new textbook. CourseSmart is a digital textbook library used by many major textbook publishers and this is definitely a work in progress. CourseSmart advertises the largest selection of etextbooks available online at low prices.

Visit the eBook Educators Group Ning to join forums and ask questions. Webinars are archived on the ning.higher education.

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