Tech Tools for Reading

How Blue Shade Helps You Sleep Better

September 2016: About Blue Shade: There has been a lot of research lately concerning the way that backlit screens on tablets like the Amazon Fire affect sleep patterns for those who read on the tablet at bedtime. The bottom line seems to be that certain wavelengths of light in the blue end of the spectrum…

Is Your Clipping Limit Exceeded?

Clipping limit? An  oxymoron? Those of us who love to mark up our books sometimes go overboard. I remember packing some of my old college textbooks and seeing how most of the text was highlighted in bright yellow. How does that help? an older and wiser me mused. Enter the age of digital text. No…

What’s wrong with Clean Reader? Maybe nothing…

When I asked educators about the usefulness of Clean Reader, the responses were definitive. Teachers don’t like it. It smacks of censorship. It dilutes the purpose of art, or worse–it bastardizes it in the name of correctness. One teacher said that the app is “a violation of all of the principles of intellectual freedom that…

8 ways to jump into eBooks from eSchool News

My favorite is “2. Research eBook best practices.” Devices and databases will work themselves out, but using these digital resources to really help kids is most likely to be worked out, as all great teaching gets worked out, in the trenches by people like you, dear Reader. So become a teacher-researcher: see how all the…

Reading Retrofit: A Tool Called Spritz

From the beginning, EduKindle has really been about the meetup between digital technology and reading. Not so much the impact of technology on the publication of text, although that has a long, long history that has involved advances in technology at every step (see Mr. Gutenberg and his press, or Mr. Hammurabi and his stele).…