EduKindle

Thank you to everyone who voted. It looks like we have a group that likes those larger fonts, with over half of the votes coming in for the #3 and #4 fonts. According to our font size chart, this means that our readers’ preference is for fonts in the 11 point to 14 point size. Everyone knows that I love a #4, but in this tally, #3 came out with the most votes.

Now vote in the next poll on features that would make the Kindle a better fit for education!

If you really want to get around the content on your Kindle, the “Back” button is key. It isn’t talked about a lot, but there is a big difference between going “back” and going to the “previous page.” Kindle Tips and Troubleshooting at Amazon tells us this much:

Back vs. Prev Page: When you are reading books, periodicals and personal documents, the Next Page and Prev Page buttons take you forward and backward within the content. The Back button is like the back button on your web browser and allows you to retrace your steps on Kindle. For example, you can follow a link in a book and then use the Back button to return to your place. Or, you can start in the Front Page section of a newspaper, follow a link to an article, read that article and hit the Back button to go back to the Front Page.

I think about the way I experience the “back” button a bit differently. It seems to be to be the most useful to think of pressing the back button as “undoing” your last click of the scroll wheel. The button takes you back to your last selection using the scroll wheel, not the page flippers.

And maybe the most important thing to understand about the back button, bar none, is that, unlike your web browser, there is no “forward” button on the Kindle. It doesn’t exist. So once you hit the back button, you have to re-navigate yourself all the way back to where you were in your content–the newspaper, for example, or the book, or whatever. Sometimes, this is darned inconvenient.

So, you can make the Kindle sing with the flippers, the menu key, and the back button, but if that right thumb twitches at the wrong moment, all you can do is curse under your breath and start over again in finding that spot in the book that you just left.

This navigation tip for the Kindle comes under the heading of “things you can do for yourself” to make navigation easier. That means setting bookmarks for things that you know you will want to find as you read.

You can set a bookmark anywhere in a book by turning down the little page corner at the top by clicking on it with the scroll wheel. Some people consider this the “cutest” feature of the Kindle, bar none. And, in truth, it is pretty cute. But it is also functional, and for this reason.

Reading with a Kindle is like riding in a car with airbags: you know you have an extra measure of safety beyond the average. This means that with the Kindle, you don’t have to worry about marking every little thing you might want to find later because you always have the “search” function. That is a safety net that no dead-tree print book will ever afford you. Remember concordances?

But it is very easy to scroll up and turn down that page corner, and then, using the techniques outlined in Navigation Tip #1, to use the flippers to move between bookmarks. (Remember, the bookmarks are the little “filled-in triangle pointers” and your current location is the “empty triangle pointer.”

By setting bookmarks agressively (remember, this is a “do for yourself” technique) you can make navigation through a big text a LOT easier for yourself.

Imagine my surprise when I got an email from Amazon telling me that my Kindle was out of memory and that they were waiting to download some content onto my Kindle but that there was no place to put it.

“Once you free up space,” the email told me, “the waiting items will be automatically delivered to your Kindle. You can also select “Check for New Items” on the Home screen menu to get new content.”

Kinda cool. Sure beats me wondering why my newspaper wasn’t delivered this morning…

When I got the notice, I took the 2G SD card out of Robin’s camera and put it in the Kindle, after powering down, of course. When I fired back up, the Wall Street Journal and a couple of other items popped right onto the SD card. Really, pretty smooth!

OK, so now you know how to use the Enhanced Progress Bar to jet around the book you are reading. If it is a big text, then this is an immense help. Otherwise, you are left clicking “next page” like the flipper button on a pinball machine.

Once you are in the vicinity of where you want to be in the text, you can hold down the “Alt” key and press “next page” or “previous page” to jump ahead (or back) more than one page at a time–5% ahead (or back) to be precise. How’s your math? You don’t even want to try to calculate how many pages (er, positions) that is, because to do so you would have to know how many pages positions this particular book has. For more of this nonsense, see this post.

(Secret EduKindle Tip: I do better on this kind of rapid scanning if I just reduce the font size to #1 and use the flippers to cover a lot of ground with each flip. With the smaller font, I am still covering ground quickly, but I am not skipping over anything–like a chapter heading, for example–which can happen when I use the Alt+flipper strategy. I also try to avoid pressing the flipper too quickly, as that seems to skip pages as well.)

Stay tuned for some more navigation tips that are a bit more precise than these “flipper” strategies.

One of the little known ways to get around the Kindle, especially if you are reading a large document, is to use the Enhanced Progress Bar. (Neat, huh?) So, how to do this?

1. Roll the scroll wheel over the Progress Bar (that line of dots across the bottom of the screen) and click. The rest of the screen grays out (after a Kindle-like pause–hang on, be patient, it will happen) and a box appears at the top with instructions on how to navigate bookmarks).

2. You will see something like this (without the labels, of course), known as the “Enhanced Progress Bar”:

You current location in the book is indicated by the “hollow” pointer, and any bookmarks that you have set are indicated by the “filled” or black markers.

3. What we are interested in right now are the number buttons that appear as images below the dots. These correspond to the number keys on the Kindle keyboard, and allow you to navigate through the book by pressing those number keys. Each key represents ten percent of the text, so if you push the “5″ key, you should jump halfway through the book.

Since the Kindle does not offer a “Go to End” on the menu bar (as it does a “Go to Beginning” option), using the Enhanced Progress Bar to jump to the end by hitting the “0″ key is quite handy, especially if you are looking for the index or endnotes.

4. Once you have pushed the number key of your choice to jump to a different spot in the book, you will see the text change but stayed “grayed out.” To start reading again, just roll the scroll wheel off the Progress Bar and, voila!, the text returns to reading mode.

5. To return to your earlier “current” position, just hit the “Back” button on the lower east side of the Kindle.

Stay tuned for more tips in this series on Kindle Navigation.

Watch the drop test from 30 inches:

Schools often get nervous about the fragility of the equipment.  Looks like Kindle could pass the test.

A recent tweet:

Theres nothing better for a boring class than a Kindle : D

Not exactly what we had in mind for the Kindle in education…(but it works for me!)

A school district in Utah has recognized the “simple market forces” that make the Kindle a viable alternative to print text today. A recent article in the Salt Lake Tribune details the purchase of 147 Kindles for teachers to work with so they can familiarize themselves and uncover ways to promote literacy using the device:

The school text market for Kindle is so far small to nonexistent, but … officials foresee the day when publishing companies embrace the medium because of simple market forces. Not only would use of the device in schools cut down on paper costs, but it would also cut down on space and energy needed to store books and move them from school to school. Rather than wait months for updated texts, they could instead be downloaded soon after revisions. The days when students strained their developing backs with a pack full of books would be over.

And, as I have noted elsewhere in the blog, options for student reading are increased when you can have the proverbial 100 books with you at all times. That’s the “third wave” of Kindle use that the article discusses.

Not sure why I couldn’t figure this out but I finally got my answer on how to place hyphens and underscores into URLs that I was typing into the Kindle’s basic web browser. Hit the SYM key (right next to the HOME key in the bottom row and a list of symbols pops up along the right side of the screen. Select anything from a dollar sign to a curly bracket and you are good to go!

Blessedly, the designers anticipated the need for the @ and / characters–these occupy their own keys on the physical keyboard.

Also, when the input box pops up for you to input a note or other text, there are several options for special characters shown across the top of the box. Each requires that you press the ALT key and another key to create the special character. ALT+6, for example, creates a question mark, ALT+8 a colon, and so forth.