Project Gutenberg is an excellent resource for free e-books, especially if you're looking for a classic. I saw that you can even download some audio books as well, such as The Call of the Wild. And you can get some of the classics, such as Alice in Wonderland, in plain text, html, or pdf versions.
Our local public libraries give patrons the ability to check out either standard ebooks or audio ebooks. I tested this out with two local library systems. The larger system, serving a city of over 900,000, had far fewer audio ebooks than my local library system, that serves a community of under 200,000. Both systems use NetLibrary. The ebooks on NetLibrary are attractive - they are basically online views of the book, with the exact same formatting, photographs, and illustrations. My local library system has about 1,000 downloadable audio ebooks at this point, but none are available for download to ipods or Macintosh computers, though they are supported by a number of other devices.
We are using audiobooks on iPods rather successfully in our school library. A grandparent at our school repairs old iPods. He approached me several months ago with the suggestion of making audiobooks available to students on the iPods. Right now we have 8 iPods with about 15 fourth- and fifth-grade level novels on each of them. We use them to expose some of the students in Title I reading classes to literature their peers are enjoying, but that they cannot yet access independently. I've purchased multiple paperback copies of the titles we have available on the iPods, and have the students listen to the audiobooks while they follow along with the actual book. The students do this twice a week for 40-minute periods, and can come in to listen to the books any time during recesses. We also let them check out the iPod and book over the weekends and during school breaks. It's been a great success.
Here are a couple of our students enjoying The Series of Unfortunate Events and Loser by Jerry Spinelli on the library's iPods.
2 comments:
Great success story, those ipod stories and paperback books. Hope you've added the idea to our California 2.0 Curriculum Connections wiki!
Wow, Ipod audio books, how great is that! What a great resource you have. I bet the kids do love them, makes them look ultra cool.
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