Post #2

For this week's e-book and app exploration activity, I spent my first few minutes searching freebie websites for picture books to download but found myself slightly disappointed. A lot of the books I found in my cursory search were YA or older books in the public domain. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, since both of those types of e-books are popular in their own right, but just weren't what I was looking for. I also believe that if I were to search a little bit deeper and on a variety of sites, I'd be able to find a lot more picture books for free. After ten minutes or so of browsing, I realized that because I have Amazon Prime I have access to a large library of popular e-books. Once I made my way to the Amazon Prime library, I downloaded and read the following picture books on my iPad's Kindle app:

- Today I'll be a Princess by Paula Croyle
- Duck! Rabbit! by Amy Krouse Rosenthal and Tom Lichtenheld (Side-note: This one's hilarious - highly recommended)
- Ada Twist, Scientist by Andrea Beaty and David Roberts
- Cool Dog, School Dog by Deborah Heiligman
- Too Many Fairies by Margaret Read Macdonald

I had a lot of fun with these texts, and was particularly surprised by how simple it was to get them all on my iPad and read. All it took to obtain the five books was opening up my Kindle app, browsing the book library, and tapping on any and all books that interested me. I'd say the process of finding and downloading all five books took less than five minutes. The ease of the download process on a Kindle (particularly if you have Prime) is a real blessing for teachers who want to build their digital library quickly and painlessly.

I also enjoyed the Kindle features I ran into throughout my readings. With picture books containing small text like Ada Twist, Scientist, I could double-tap the words and the chunk of text would pop up on a larger window atop the page. A few of the picture books also allowed for pinch-to-zoom on illustrations, which is helpful for hunting down small details in the background (although I can imagine some students could use this feature to the point of distraction). One other Kindle-exclusive feature worth noting was the side panel that popped up upon opening a few of the picture books. Although the information provided there (expanded author bios, a "follow" button for the author, synopsis, etc.) could prove useful for an adult book buyer, I found it to be a little bit of an annoyance to have to close out of and imagine student readers may either read it without needing to or need to be shown how to exit out of it.

Surprisingly, my more negative thoughts are not regarding what features the Kindle e-books have but what they lack. Although highlighting and the dictionary aren't necessarily features that a young reader of picture books may need often, I was surprised that they weren't available for these texts. This is because, I realized, the Kindle app treats picture books like a series of images rather than strings of text, meaning that the actual words in the picture book are to the app just another part of the picture. In other words, text can't be highlighted, read aloud, used in text-to-speech, or looked up because the app doesn't recognize them as words. A lot of opportunities for students to engage further with the text, it seems, are missed because of this. I was also frustrated that I could only zoom in some of the books I downloaded, particularly when I wanted to look more closely at illustration details.

In terms of apps for reading education, I am happy to see the sheer variety of apps and programs available to assist struggling and new readers. Apps like Dyslexic Like Me, Blio, and Dragon Dictation that help readers with disabilities are genius, particularly considering how the sort of accessibility they provide is unavailable with traditional ink-on-paper books. I'm also a fan of "gamifying" literacy for reluctant readers, so I find apps like Word Wizard and Jumbline to be useful as potential instructional tools.

Finally, I find that integrating e-reading into my class will be simple as many students purchase our textbook as e-books already and I assign online texts often. However, I would like to go a step further than this and integrate available tools into the classroom. I think I'll do a brief introduction to using all of an e-reader or e-reader app's tools to my students before assigning a text annotation project similar to that laid out in chapter 3 of Bridging Technology and Literacy. Assigning students to summarize and comment on different textbook pages to create a class annotation of a chapter would be helpful in cementing information.