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In this webinar, expert in eBooks Meredith Wemhoff discusses ways to engage and support learners with special needs using eBooks and audio. Using the case-study of an independent all-boys school located in Surrey, the school provides special needs students an opportunity to succeed and thrive. Many arrive to the 80-year-old institution with low self-confidence, often due to struggles they faced in traditional educational institutions caused by learning and language difficulties. This means providing a collection that meets the individual learning needs of the school's 470 students, who range in age from 8-18. ​​​​​​​ During this eye-opening webinar, Meredith will share the story of selecting, launching and promoting a digital library service that helps address learning challenges. Attendees will come away with best practices for bringing ebooks and audiobooks to their school and real-life examples of these practices in action. Don't miss out, register today!

This handy tool lets you turn PDF's into cool flippable online magazines. You can create all kinds of student projects with this tool.

An intuitive online book creator - write, draw, add images and share. The site has a bank of backgrounds to choose from and a range of tools to draw items into the books.

A platform that lets you create ebooks.

This website tracks deals and freebies for Kindle books. You can also upload your Wish list and it will tell you when the price drops or it goes free. It is really one of the easiest websites for tracking and finding good reading deals (that are worth your time.) Very cool site.

So many great books for so many uses. Here are some art books you'll want to share and use.

Yes, this study was funded by Booktrack (a 2011 study), however, I find that the information is fascinating. By setting sound tracks of different mood music, this study showed: *Virtually all subjects performed moderately to significantly better on information retention tests. * Subjects reported a strong correlation with interacting with the enhanced platform and an ability to focus. There are other results on this, but I find this fascinating and find this a very interesting point to consider as ebooks evolve. Will ebook authors attach music to different pages? Will reading become more cinematic and theatrical? All kinds of interesting thoughts here.

There continues to be a problem that not all books in the Amazon kindle store have real page numbers. If students are expected to cite sources and not allowed to use location numbers, then Amazon can expect the pushback seen on this forum post. Meanwhile, a helpful person on the forum has noted how you can know what to read on the Kindle if your professor or teacher says "read page 80-92" - you can dive into the table of contents on the website and save a copy. This is the only solution. It is time for Amazon to get their act together and have all Kindle ebooks display page numbers if there is a printed copy of the book. If there is not a printed copy of the book, there needs to be a consistent reference point or "page" that all can use for sourcing and citing content. "1. Look up the book in the in the Amazon Kindle store (where you purchased it). 2. Click on the book where it says "Look Inside." You want to look at the table of contents, which will have the pages numbers for each chapter. 3. It defaults to the "kindle edition," which does not have the page numbers in the table of contents. However, there is a tab above that says "Print Book." Click on that. 4. Once you're on the "Print Book" display, it shows the page numbers in the TOC. By doing the above, I was able to determine that "the first 26 pages" = Chapters 1 & 2. I used Evernote to take a screen capture of the entire TOC, which I'll refer back to."

This is a fascinating wiki full of myths and truths about ebook readers. It says it is maintained by the users of the site. I've found it to be quiet accurate as I perused this page. If you have questions about ebooks, this is a great reference.

Information on whispercast and how to sign up. This looks like the system for managing Kindles belonging to your school and in fact, you should move towards this. I don't know about moving the books you already have. I do like how you can upload pdf's etc. to distribute.

Some rules have changed as I've been reading up on having Kindles at schools. (Back in February I read a spate of posts mentioning that Amazon said that having 6 kindles share one account was just for "personal use" and that libraries can't do it.) But Amazon does have information on Whispercast which lets you handle distributing books. It is a "free self-service online tool" and I'm thinking that it is something we need to be using. It looks like you can also distribute many of the free ebooks onto Kindles. 

The recent Kindle updates over the past few months have quite a few teachers. In particular, if you have a textbook on Kindle, you can collate notes by color, which is a major enhancement.  This article does a nice job of summarizing the features important to educators. "The update also brings some changes that should be especially helpful for students and teachers, like the ability to highlight long passages that span multiple pages. In addition, the Notebook feature for textbooks has new filtering options, which should help you more quickly and easily find all your notes, bookmarks, and highlights by colour"

An excellent compendium of information about writing and publishing ebooks that is continually updated by the author. Great work.

Retired and would happily sell the e-book rights to my out of paper book for one dollar. http://www.textbooksfree.org/Test-Prep%20Mathematics.htm

Another one of my students has been writing and sharing on the Kindle Kids Corner. Here's an interview she did about trends in Young Adult fiction and I agree with so much of what she's written. This is another example of how authentic projects can transform a student. This happened to come out of one of my favorite kindle book sites - Kindle Nation Daily and an email conversation I had with the author Steven Windwalker (penname.) 

Free widgets to add to your iBooks with iBook Author

Free textbooks in a variety of topics on CK-12. This is promoted as "learning made simple." Do students know how to find and download alternate sources of information? Can they find and search for the topics they are currently studying? This is a valuable way to compare and research topics.

Open sourced textbooks that meet the criteria of the American Institute of Mathematics Editorial board. Students can download these in PDF format.

HOw to borrow Kindle books from your local library. It often requires setup of overdrive here in the US. This is an important skills for modern students, particularly if they have a tablet device, they should know how to check out books from their local library. Don't show them how to use the card catalog, set them up on overdrive and show them how to use it.

There are some cool new features in the Kindle app - in addition to xray and notebook (previous feature upgrades) you have multi-colored highlighting, brightness sync across devices and a prompt to rate a book when finished (I like this one because, perhaps, more REAL people will rate amidst many book reviewers who are either biased for or against an author for undisclosed reasons.) Update that iOS or Droid Kindle app or whatever device it is on. 

BlogBooker is a free site that turns your blog into a PDF book from all the blog's entries and comments. It works with WordPress, LiveJournal and Blogger blogs. It is very simple. You export your blog (slightly different process for each blog service - BlogBooker has instructions for you) and then upload it to BlogBooker. It then assembles everything into a high-quality PDF file. This can take a few minutes or longer depending on the size of your blog. This is a great way to print your BlogBook or make an archive/backup of the blog. It could also be useful for students and educators as a way to save a blog as a portfolio item.