Internet Travels Edcerpts are my weekly round up of interesting links and ideas I discovered on the internet. It is published on Mondays for the previous week Quick and dirty Edcerpts for the week, I’ve been working on my Ohio Educational Technology Conference (OETC) presentations in all of my free time. If you’re in Columbus…
Source: Bookshlf Can’t find a book for a student? Check out Bookshlf. It is a service where the curation of books happen by people, not algorithms. Think of it as Pinterest, but for books, not pictures. And like Pinterest, you need an account to see more than a few posts in a category. For Bookshlf,…
A new study in Frontiers in Psychology finds that children prefer storybooks containing more causal information. The results could help parents and teachers to choose the most engaging books to increase children’s interest in reading, which is important in improving early literacy and language skills. Children have a burning urge to understand the mechanics of the…
Source: Duolingo ABC – Learn to Read on the App Store Duolingo is known for it’s line of language learning apps, and now they are getting into the learning to read arena. Due to the numerous school closures, Duolingo is making the reading app available early. The app has no ads or in-app purchases and is…
Source: Epic!: Read Amazing Children’s Books Online – Unlimited Access to the Best Books and Learning Videos For Kids 12 and Under I stumbled upon Epic! when I read about their free activity calendars. Although the service has a price for families, it is free to use in your classroom. Their quickstart guide is available…
The Google Fonts team has teamed up with Thomas Jockin to create a series of fonts that are aimed at improving reading speed. To learn more about the research behind this initiative, see here for more details. Source: G Suite Updates Blog: New fonts intended to help improve reading speed now available in Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides…
Source: Social Media Time Alternatives – Omni Calculator I view social media the same as candy. It’s nice to have as a treat, but if it is all you do, then your going to have negative consequences. Here is a calculator that shows what you could accomplish if you weren’t mindlessly scrolling through your feeds….
Source: C-Pen Reader Although it is pricey at $250, the C-Pen Reader could be very useful for people with reading difficulties. The C-Pen Reader is a device that can read printed text to the reader just by scanning the text with the pen. That’s pretty cool!
For anyone who has ever been a reader, there’s much to sympathize with in Maryanne Wolf’s Reader, Come Home. The UCLA neuroscientist, a great lover of literature, tries to read Hermann Hesse’s Glass Bead Game, an old favorite, only to realize that she finds him boring and too complex. She wonders why he ever won a Nobel….
Our Internet-driven society has seen a decline in book reading, though not necessarily a decline in reading altogether. Despite book readers being less common than in past decades, we all do a fair amount of reading each day on our smartphones – reading messages from friends, or tweets, emails, Facebook posts, notifications, articles, and so…