What Would Happen if Reading Was More Social?

It is hard to imagine my world without books yet for many students this is their reality. From a young age I could always remember my love for reading. For many, reading is a very personal and solitary activity. But things are about to change. You see it is now possible using eReaders like the Kindle to share ideas and engage others in the books that you are reading. With so many students engaged in the use of electronic and digital devices we have seen that the amount of time students are reading books has plummeted. Yet we know from a recent study ( 2010 Kids & Family Reading Report-published by the Harrison Group) that many students reported that they would be very interested in reading an e-book on an electronic device. Devices like the Kindle are very appealing reading devices because of all the built in features. Many students will enjoy the ability to change the size of the font or use the text to speech feature to have the book read to them. But from my perspective the Kindle opens up all kinds of possibilities for making reading a more social activity.

Now for a moment imagine that all of your students in your reading class had Kindles and were reading the same novel on their eReader. You with me so far? On the Kindle it is possible for the students to set up their social networks like Facebook and Twitter which would allow then to automatically post text they highlight in the book as well as notes they have taken on a particular passage. If all of the students have Facebook and Twitter accounts they can simply log into their accounts and view what their friends have posted about the book. If students use a simple # hashtag when posting their notes then it would be possible to search their Twitter accounts to see what everyone has posted. Likewise students could use a service like Tweetchat and with the hashtag have real time discussions about the book. Students would need to have access to WiFi to accomplish this, but as we move forward being able to utilize social networking to engage students in the reflection and discussion of the books they are reading can be a tipping point to more fully engage students in the reading process.Bring social networking into the reading process may just be the factor that keeps students engaged and coming back for more. I would be interested in your perspective so please leave comment.

Experimenting with the Kindle 3

Once I saw that the Kindle 3 with WiFi was launched for $139 dollars I had to get my hands on it to test it out. Early reviews of the Kindle 3 were stellar praising Amazon for the redesign and the feature set in such a  small and lightweight package. Many of the reviewers praised the new high contrast E ink screen as well as the sleek design. At 8.5 ounces the Kindle 3 can hold its charge for a month's time and store over 3,500 ebooks. Since the first Kindle was released I was impressed with the fact that it had built in text to speech capabilities which I thought would be a great reading tool for some of the students that I work with. Early on Amazon was challenged by a union of  professional narrators who felt that having text to speech capabilities in some way interfered with its members livelihood. Amazon did settle and gave publishers the right to have the speech disabled if they so desired. When you download books from Amazon you can see if the speech is enabled or disabled for a specific book title.

The experience of buying the Kindle 3 off of the Amazon website was fast and pleasant and I was offered the opportunity to apply for an Amazon credit card that when approved gave gave me credit to purchase the Kindle case. When my Kindle 3 arrived in the mail it was already registered and the screen prompted me to turn it on how to get started. There was even a personal note from Jeff Bezo's about my purchase and how I could provide feedback to Amazon about the Kindle 3. I used the Kindle for a couple of days and then realized that the power switch was defective. I called Amazon's Customer Service on a Thursday evening and explained what happened and by Saturday afternoon FedEx dropped off a new one. That was impressive service to say the least. Once my new Kindle 3 was turned on  I synced it with the Whispernet service and all of my books were downloaded and I was ready to enjoy reading. It is hard to believe just how thin and light weight the Kindle 3 is when you are holding it. Based on my experience of using the Kindle 2, the Kindle 3 definitely refreshes the pages much faster than the second generatoin Kindle and the screen is much brighter. Having the freedom to change the size of the font and spacing of text is a great feature and one that I have come to rely on. Turning on the text to speech is easy to do and you have access to male and female voice. You can adjust the speed that the text is being read and the page will automatically advance when it is being read. The speech engine is adequate for the job but is by no means a high quality speech engine experience.

The Kindle 3 does have a jack to plug in a headset or ear buds and there is a volume control rocker switch which makes it easy to adjust the volume level. Pausing the text to speech is easy enough by pressing on the Space key. The Kindle 3 is easy and enjoyable to use and for the price it is unmatched in terms of features and functionality. I for one am very impressed with the Kindle 3 and have enjoyed the experience of using it to read ebooks. It certainly gives those of us who work in the field of assistive technology another option when we are looking for tools with text to speech capabilities.

iSpeech - Text to Speech Services

Today I was reading the weekend edition of the Star-Ledger and came across an interesting article about Enterprise Development Center, a high-tech incubation center, which is located on the campus of New Jersey Institute of Technologist. In the article the writer highlighted a company called iSpeech, that provides text to speech services in the cloud. I went over to iSpeech to see what they are about and they offer a full range of text to speech services which could be indispensable for educators that need to convert text into audio. Once I signed up for the free service I was able to convert and upload some Microsoft Word files to test out the service. The conversion process was straight forward with an easy to use interface. Once the file was converted I was able to download it as a mp3 file and play it in iTunes. There are lots of interesting ways that teachers could use this tool to support students with reading disabilities in the classroom. So give it a try and let me know what you think. For more information go to iSpeech. Click on the player below to get a sense of the text to speech quality.

NJECC Presentation: Reading & Writing Supports

This Tuesday, March 16th I will be presenting at the New Jersey Educational Computing Cooperative Annual Conference which is held at Montclair State University on the topic of: What's New in the Area of Reading & Writing Supports. My session is from 2:30-3:20 pm and if you are planning on attending it would be great to see you. A lot has happened this year in the field of assistive technology and in the field of technology in general which has resulted in some new and updated technologies that I'm sure you will want to find out about.

I have been busy this year publishing some new materials which can be used to support assistive technology in the schools. I recently released a new video called: Assistive Technology: Powerful Solutions for Success which is a wonderful tool for teacher in-service programs. Likewise, in this age of information overload I created a four page laminated reference guide called: Assistive Technology: What Every Educator Needs to Know, which is chock full of resources and information about the use of assistive technology in the classroom. I will have both resources available at my workshop for you to take a look at. The session will be fast paced as we delve into some of the new tools and trends to support students in the area of reading and writing in the classroom. I hope to see you there- but just in case you can't make it here is my presentation deck that I will be using.



PS: You can now purchase my video and laminated reference guides right from my blog by clicking on the individual pages on the right side of the navigation panel.

Introducing the enTourage eDGe™

Introducing the enTourage eDGe™

There is a lot of excitement being generated this year at the Consumer Electronics Show 2010 in Las Vegas with the release of new eBook Readers. I thought you would be interested in learning about this very interesting device called the enTourage which marries a netbook as well as an Ereader. Think of all the possibilities!

The enTourage eDGe™ is the world’s first dualbook, combining the functions of an e-reader, netbook, notepad, and audio/video recorder and player in one. It’s a comprehensive device that lets you read e-books, surf the Internet, take digital notes, send emails and instant messages, watch movies and listen to music anywhere, at any time. This is nothing you've ever seen before!

Get books wirelessly, move files onto your enTourage eDGe™ using an SD card or a USB flash drive. Use the mini-USB port to move files back and forth from a Windows, MAC, or Linux-based PC. And with a netbook built in, you can forget the limitations of other e-readers, the enTourage eDGe™ does it all!

Context Organizer- One Strategy for Students with Reading Disabilities

For the past 1 1/2 I have been working closely with Henry Lewkowicz at Context Discovery to help get the word out about his innovative software application, Context Organizer. Context Organizer is Windows based application that can very quickly summarize information from various sources. In today's information age all of us are bombarded with information that is coming at us from all angles at the speed of light. But in order to keep up we must have access to this information and be pretty good at skimming and reading quickly all of the text. If we are on the web or reading a Word or PDF files we must be able to read quickly and absorb the information if we are to keep up in our fields. This is where Context Organizer comes in-imagine that you had this reading agent that could go through the document or the web site and summarize the information and pull out all of the relevant information and contextualize it for you. Well you no longer have to wait- you see Context Organizer is here and is your humble reading servant. For example you can go to a web site and click on the Context Organizer icon on your browser and voila- the web site contents are summarized for you to read. If you find that you need to delve more into the web site simply click on the link to take you there. Likewise, you can instantly send the summaries from Context Organizer to Microsoft Word for further review or editing. You see, Context Organizer is an invaluable and transformational tool and could be a god send for students and adults with reading disabilities who have to process a great deal of text. By combining Context Organizer with a text to speech tool, students could process that much more text, and get to the heart of the matter that much more quickly. Context organizer can also be used to search and summarize the contents of your Google searches eliminating the need to go to each and every site that Google suggests. If you like what you see in the search, read the summarization, if not discard it and move to the next summary. It is really that easy. If you would like to try out Context Organizer you can download a 30 day Trial from Context Discovery. You can also check out this video that I put together on using Context Organizer on the web.

Searching Google with Context Organizer

One of the tools that I have been relying more and more on is Context Organizer. With the increase of information that we all need to process it is great to have a tool like Context Organizer to help me make sense of the information and summarize it for me. I have explained in past blog posts how Context Organizer can be used with MindManager 8 to build a map from URL's, PDF files and Word Documents. But one of the most powerful features is being able to do Google Searches and within seconds have the sites that are found summarized with key words and relevancy at my disposal. Context Organizer allows me to do my Google searches and processes them with a click of the button. If you want to see what I'm talking about then take a look at the video below to give you an idea of the power of this tool.

While not specifically developed for individuals with reading difficulties just think of how this can be used to help students deal with the mountains of text that they encounter each and every day. Using Context Organizer, information can be quickly summarized for students and then using a text to speech software the information could be read. There is also the ability to send the summaries to Microsoft Word which could make this a great research tool for students with reading and writing disabilities. Think of this as cognitive assist for students with reading disabilities and a great tool for doing research. You can download a trial of Context Organizer at their website.