EduKindle

Joe Wikert has a great post about the reaction of a student to the use of a Kindle in the classroom.  We would like to hear stories about educational uses of the Kindle here as well!  Lee Ann has started using her Kindle with students in her high school classroom and will be reporting her updates here.

What stands out in thinking about Kindles as educational devices has to do with the way in which the Kindle stimulates people young and old to read more.  The most respected educational researchers tell us that more reading is the key to improved reading skills.  One nationally recognized educator and high school English teacher pointed out to this writer that “the world is a tough place if you can’t read.”

So, if the Kindle means more reading, then the Kindle means better reading.  Do you agree?

When I first got my Kindle I was gaga about the free wireless connection.  I figured that it would allow me to look stuff up, check email, post to this blog, and do all kinds of cool stuff.

Something that I learned was how many dedicated “mobile” services now exist to do this kind of thing.  One of them is the Wapedia, a mobile version of Wikipedia.  With the limited browsing capability of the Kindle, this kind of simply formatted site makes it easy to look up information you need on the spur of the moment.

At the mobile site for EduKindle, I put a link to Wapedia in the productivity section.  Got a question that needs answering?   Check it out!

Much research highlighted in the past few years indicates the importance of time spent reading as the key factor in reading improvement for students.  One path the debate has taken concerns the amount of reading that kids do on the web.  The New York Times addressed this factor in a recent article.

However, as Lee Ann points out in her comment to a post on this site:

Stephen Krashen (The Power of Reading) has said that access to books is the variable that most impacts students’ reading time, so I would imagine that have an entire library on a Kindle would certainly increase how much students read. Books at their fingertips is always my goal for students and Kindles would accomplish that and much more than what I can supply per table top in the classroom.

If we look at access to books as the key, research clearly states the more the better:

In examining the average 2005 math scores of 12th graders who lived in homes with fewer than 10 books, an analysis of federal Education Department statistics found that those students scored much lower than those who lived in homes with more than 100 books. Although some of those results could be attributed to income gaps, Mr. Iyengar noted that students who lived in homes with more than 100 books but whose parents only completed high school scored higher on math tests than those students whose parents held college degrees (and were therefore likely to earn higher incomes) but who lived in homes with fewer than 10 books.

Of course, this research addresses a number of factors through this single metric: homes in which books are valued usually contain more books.  But the practical outcome of this factor is that kids in homes which value books are exposed to more books, and hence have more opportunity to read.

So, if we sent kids home everyday with a Kindle loaded with 100 books (or more, since the Kindle has capacity for more), would we start to chip away at the impact of homes having too few books for kids to become better readers?

Not an idle question, especially if one of those books were Stephanie Meyers’ wildly popular Twilight.  It’s on my Kindle (and it cost me $6.03)…

The ability to read a book, a newspaper, whatever, at a congenial font size is part of what makes the Kindle such a pleasure to use. The demographics of older readers with aging eyes like my own make this a strong incentive to get involved with electronic (and configurable) text.

But what about students? Research that I have seen over the years suggests that font size also plays a part in students’ ability to access text. We certainly see larger text supplied for very young eyes in picture books and early readers. What we don’t know about how the size of print affects older students’ reading is astounding. That is another reason to investigate the Kindle for educational purposes.

Everyone knows a couple of things about font size on the Kindle. 1) You can change it to suit your fancy and 2) the Kindle has six font sizes to choose from, more than the Sony reader. You may also know, if you follow this blog, that my persoanl favorite font size for reading is font size #4.

Thanks to Paul Biba over at Telereads, we now know what font sizes the Kindle numbering system refers to. Come to find out, my eyes find a 14 point font particularly easy and pleasing to read. Here is the complete list:

# 1 = 7pt

# 2 = 9pt

# 3 = 11 pt

# 4 = 14 pt

# 5 = 17 pt

# 6 = 20 pt

Try that 14 pt. It is a beautiful thing.

This is a much bruited topic and one that creates a little bit of anxiety for us bibliophiles who have made the conversion to the Kindle. How can I tell what page I am on??? I mean, I have only spent my whole life using page numbers as the reference point for a) how far along in the book I am, and b) any references to the text that I want to make in a post, article, or other scholarly writing.

This lingering anxiety tells me something about the “purpose” of the Kindle. That purpose is reading in a “frictionless” way (adjective courtesy of Jeff Bezos). The Kindle is not very well set up to address these other little anxieties I feel.

So, I got out my calculator to see if I could find a rule for converting Kindle’s “position number” into the “page numbers” of the actual book.

OK, first problem: which actual book–the hardcover, the paperback? First editions, fifth edition? Right there you see the intractability of the problem.

But I forged on, nonetheless, with my hardcover copy of Carol Dweck’s Mindset. You get the wackiest correlation if you try to literally use every paper page fo the book. First, all those pages aren’t in the Kindle edition. Second, spacing considerations make it almost impossible to come up with a formula that is anywhere near accurate if you try to use all the pages.

I got closest to a useful formula when I took the first actual numbered page of the book (not including the introduction)–that is, a page with “1″ on it, and looked up the corresponding “position” on my Kindle. As it turns out, Page 1 appears at position “95″ on the Kindle. Then, I went to the last full page of the text, page 239 (not the notes, index, or other “last” page) and checked the position: 4035. So, I had 3940 positions spread over 236 pages (the first page of text was actually page 3). 3940 divided by 236 yields 16.69 positions per page.

Using this formula I could pretty much find the page in book if I knew the position. In all my test cases, I landed within one page of the text I was searching for if I divided the position number by 16.69.

Whew!  If you have a friend with the print book and you want to point them to a passage, use of the chapter number might be your best bet.  If they want to point you to a passage, you can search for a key term.  Or you can both try this little formula and wait for the MLA to provide us some guidance!