See that little button at the top of this post with the “k” on it? If you click it, you will be given the opportunity to send the post in its entirety to your Kindle reading device.

First, you’ll have to log in to an account with a Kindle reading device associated with it. Next, pick the device in that account you want to send to, and then press the send button when the image of the post comes up. It’s that simple.

Next question, where will my article or post appear on the Kindle. On my original Kindle Fire, I kept looking for the article but didn’t see it. Why? First, the article appeared on my carousel almost instantaneously, represented by the one image that I had included in the post. There was nothing else to indicate that this was my new content, and, sad to say, the image itself didn’t tip me off. I also looked under my Library with no luck, and then in my Docs shelf, again with no luck. What was the problem?

Well, I hadn’t checked the box on the initial Amazon screen to “Archive in Your Kindle Library,” which meant it would not show up in the library. Then, when I looked at my Docs, I was looking at the “Cloud” view rather than the “Device” view. When I looked on “Device,” there it was.

So, if you have been using work-arounds for years, as I have, to get web content onto the Kindle in an easily readable format, then the arrival of the “Send to Kindle” button will make you happy. Time Magazine, Boing Boing, and the Washington Post have adopted the button. In the picture, you can see the little button with the “k” on it in the sidebar with all of the other sharing options.

I mean, there are more than five reasons, and frankly I put that in the headline because the pundits say it makes more people read the post, like the numerical approach scratches some itch we have in the reptilian brain or something. In any case, I should say “at least five,” because this nifty little news app is kind of addicting.

In case you haven’t heard of Pulse, you can get caught up at Wikipedia by clicking here.

Now I have used Pulse for a while, and it has many, many competitors. It is kind of like Flipboard and kind of like Zite (which has been my self-curating news app of choice for a while), but somehow it outperforms them for me. First, with Pulse, you are curating actual source streams, rather than curating your interest areas. In this sense, Pulse is less responsive to your likes and dislikes and more responsive to your directions. You tell it, it does it. Your taps on the screen don’t disappear into some black box that generates stuff that the little person in the black box thinks you want to read, as is the case with Zite. (It’s a beautiful engine, don’t get me wrong. Just different.) Or what your friends are reading or recommending (like Flipboard). Pulse lets you work in feeds from your Facebook timeline but I have to say, mine looked pretty weak when compared to the powerhouse sources in my other selected streams. (I love my friends.)

You won’t be surprised to learn that you can install Pulse on all your devices (as I have done). One thing this means is that I don’t have to remember to grab the iPad on my way out the door. All my starred articles along with fresh articles from my feeds are there for me on my Android phone or my iPhone. Or my Fire (on the bed-stand). Or my Fire HD (by the comfy chair in the living room). Or even my Nook Color (sadly, gathering dust on the bookshelf in my study). Then, by logging into Pulse on each device, I have all my stuff fresh and ready to go everywhere at all times. This is par for the course today, but it still turns me on as much as having all my reading with me at all times when I bought my first Kindle 1.

OK, double head fake, there are five reasons. And these would be them, in no particular order:

1. Read better writers. I love reading the New York Times because the writing is just so good, but Pulse opens up a veritable garden of publications that prize great writing to go along with great thinking. For example, give this article a try: Let’s Save Great Ideas from the Ideas Industry, by (you guessed it) Umair Haque. Who is Umair Haque, you ask? Exactly. Where has this guy been all my life?

2. Curate yourself. (Another Pulse competitor, Taptu, uses the “DJ” metaphor, as in “DJ Your News.”) There is a different feel to performing self-curation of streams (no news to avid RSS reader fans from time immemorial) and somehow it avoids the cloying effect of getting more and more articles “like this one” on Zite. Every time I winnow down “what I like” on Zite I feel like my world just got a little smaller. Isn’t the logical outcome that, sooner or later, my Zite magazine would become a solipsistic echo chamber from which I could never escape, kind of like Fox News? I think there is always a place for browsing rather than searching. It’s why I can still spend hours poking around in a bookstore rather than simply following the “People who bought this book also bought these books” recommendations on Amazon.

3. Get inspired. Once you start browsing and not searching, who knows what might tickle your fancy? Without Pulse, I wouldn’t be reading Salon, and so wouldn’t know about the new series on the Bible on the History Channel (I do live in a cave), and for sure wouldn’t have had the chance to read what Willa Paskin has to say about it. Stuff like: “It’s narrated by someone who sounds like he’s fresh off a gig doing a National Geographic nature documentary, which can be odd, like when “Desperate, the Israelites resort to cannibalism” is one of the voice-over lines. God, even when speaking from the Burning Bush, sounds sweet, like a kindergarten teacher, but he has a very faint, unplaceable accent, though you figure God would be fluent in everything.” Nor would I have known about the article by James Poniewozik, who surveys “recent storylines about faith” and includes Friday Night Lights, Big Love, and The Good Wife as shows that tackle faith based issues in contemporary settings for their audiences. All of which are small, small fractions of the audience pulled in by The Bible, at 13.1 million (a larger audience than any for any show last month on mainstream NBC). Which leads to Paskin’s choice of the title for her article, “Is ‘The Bible’ Comfort TV?”

Do I really need two more reasons to make the point? Maybe one is that the size of the Kindle Fire is very comfy to use in bed and doesn’t take up much space on the nightstand. Because it has good battery life, it can just sit there for days and days, ready to feed my brain when I feel like picking it up. (Okay, that’s four.) The final reason is an obvious one: think about how much interest-based reading could go on if kids exercised choice among a whole lot of articles that look interesting. The glimpse into evolution and the x-chromosone I got from reading the article about “the father of all men” being twice as old as previously thought was a bit of a refresher course for me in evolutionary biology.

You have heard of the “flipped” classroom? The discovery mechanism of Pulse could be an important tool for teachers as they attempt to “flip” their classrooms for the benefit of kids. (And that’s five.)

Read better writers. Curate yourself. Get inspired. Sounds like a prescription for 21st-century learning to me.

As a follow up to our chat a few weeks back, Worldreader CEO David Risher was kind enough to answer a few more questions for me. First, I wondered how the money from the Bezos grant would be used?

Our goal this year is to move from 10,000 kids with access to e-readers to over 50,000.  Jeff’s grant is a big part of that– it helps us get more books from publishers, train teachers and students, ship the e-readers– we’re even using it to help develop a solar case that kids can use to keep their e-readers charged.

As I mentioned in Part 1 of the interview, Worldreader played a role in the development of Whispercast, the enterprise content management tool Amazon now offers to customers deploying content across a large collection of Kindles, like a school or corporation. I think it is neat to hear about the “solar case” they are now developing to improve the utility of the devices in the bush. As Worldreader tackles the issues of deploying Kindles to remote areas, this role as an innovator in the design and functionality of the platform is welcomed, and is already producing outcomes that affect the educational use of these devices in positive ways.

Next, I asked David whether, with so many kids in the US who can’t read, if he envisions a time when the US will be part of Worldreader’s world?

Someday, but honestly it’s not a focus in the near term.  The reason is that in the US we have plenty of ways to get books– on-line retailers, lots of libraries, and so forth.  Plus to a large extent the revolution here is in more expensive tablets– we’ve got books (and easy access to electricity!), so as a consequence technology in education is happening at a different level.

Our are of biggest impact is where there are very few books (in Sub Saharan Africa, half the classrooms basically have no books at all) and not much physical (road) infrastructure– that’s where we can make the biggest difference.

Finally, I asked David how geopolitics fit into his thinking about where WR goes and what it’s impact may be?

You know, we’re pretty open minded about where we go, so long as it’s an area where there’s a broad recognition that education and literacy matter.  If you look at the books we’ve got in our program, they run the gamut from national-curriculum textbooks to international storybooks to atlases to health information.  Repressive governments don’t want that sort of material in folks’ hands, but thankfully, the number of those governments is going down every day.  (Though we do try to avoid geographies with high corruption indices, as measured by Transparency International.)

Really, wherever cell phone coverage is extensive (and in much of Africa it’s at about 80% penetration), we’re happy to come.

Again, I am astounded by the growth and effectiveness of the work that David and his team have achieved with Worldreader. Although it may be many years before the effects of the program become evident, providing direct access to text has driven Western culture since the time of Gutenberg. That Worldreader will have a liberating effect on those young readers it reaches seems indisputable. That the world of Worldreader is growing is an indisputably positive development.

Had an opportunity to catch up with David Risher, founder and head of Worldreader, the group that is transforming literacy around the world by sending Kindles loaded with books to the remotest reaches of the planet. He sounds like he is having a blast. And who wouldn’t be, when the CEO of a little internet start­up called Amazon just donated a half a million dollars to the cause?

David Risher

Risher, no stranger to mighty enterprises given his background at Microsoft and, um, the aforementioned Amazon itself, has presided over one of the truly great stories of the e­-book revolution. And he believes that things are just getting started.

We talked about the days when an e-­ink Kindle cost almost $400. Blows my mind to think that I bought two at that price. But with the decline in price for e­readers of all kinds, and especially for e­-ink models of all shapes and sizes, Risher sees the equation shifting dramatically in the Worldreader budget from hardware expense to content expense.

I asked about how Worldreader manages content across its growing installed base of Kindles. He told me that Worldreader worked with Amazon on the development of its new Kindle content management system, Whispercast. Just like so many librarians in the early days–­­Kathy Parker in IL comes to mind–­­David painted a picture of spreadsheets and Kindle nicknames and copies of books shared among Kindles. Oh my! Whispercast is a great step forward for the Kindle as an enterprise device, even if the enterprise is a single elementary school.

I encourage you to learn more about Worldreader at its website. David and Zev and Colin truly are changing the world with the program. I daresay that the distribution of these Kindles to those who need them will have a stronger long term impact on the way America is perceived in distant corners of the earth than will the strategy of military intervention we have relied on for so long.

Visit eBook Educators Group

A helpful infographic on e-books and print books, thanks to TeachingDegree.org. Of course we want to have a print book in hand when reading Goodnight Moon to our little one!

Photo courtesy of Engadget.

Based on our admittedly informal and small sample survey, the answer is YES. 83% of our respondents indicated that they would consider a Mini instead of a full sized iPad for their schools. On the flip side, over 80% indicated that the Mini does not offer them anything new that they don’t already have access to right now. (The remaining 16% cited the Mini’s size as more appropriate to smaller hands.)

Tow thirds of the respondents are currently using touch screen devices in their school or district, so these are folks who know something about these devices and how they can support teaching and learning. When asked about first impressions, the strongest one had to do with price: half the respondents said that they would prefer something with a lower price point than the iPad Mini.

What is your first impression of the Mini? (Click to enlarge.)

Please help us with this week’s survey for educators: Facebook or Linked In? Which do you prefer? Take the survey by clicking right HERE. And thanks!

The recent Pew report on Young Americans’ Reading and Library Habits contains a number of great take-aways, including the news that young people frequent libraries at an unexpectedly high rate. But another finding has emerged that may have an impact on the way that schools think about pleasure reading and reading instruction both inside and outside school.

The finding is simple:

Readers under 30 prefer cellphones and computers. Those over 30 like dedicated devices such as the Kindle.Among e-book users surveyed, between ages 16-29, more than half read one on a desktop or laptop and around 40 per cent use a cellphone. Around 25 per cent used an e-reader. Among respondents 30 and older, 46 per cent preferred e-readers, just 25 per cent cellphones.

Perhaps in line with this finding, the report also states that

…teen readers were less likely to read an ebook than those immediately older. Around 12 per cent of respondents aged 16-17 read an ebook over the past year, compared to 21 per cent for ages 18-24 and 25 per cent for ages 30-39.

So what do these findings tell us as educators? I think that one conclusion from the numbers is reasonable: the younger you are, the less likely you are to own or have regular access to a dedicated e-reader. We already know that young people don’t read very much, at least not enough to become proficient readers. But when the time comes to access text digitally, they do so on the devices that they have access to: their phones and the computers that are readily accessible at home, at school, and at the library.

Implications for educators? There is a lot of talk about “bring your own device” (BYOD) in schools, and this finding would seem to support the idea that schools should make more use of the devices that students actually have with them every day (instead of forcing them to pay a dollar to park them at a truck nearby the school–more here). The average smartphone has more computing power than the early computers that schools purchased and installed in computer labs for students to use. So why don’t we make more use of these resources, since students clearly do not “add” an e-reader device until they get older?

Can you think of other factors that would lead to the disparity in e-book reading and in e-reader use between young and old that the Pew report documents?

David Pogue, the uber-tech-reviewer for the New York Times, took a minute this week to decipher the place of the new Kindle Paperwhite in the still robust market for E-Ink-based readers. On balance, I think he got it right. The Paperwhite addresses a concern long held by a certain segment of e-book aficionados: how to read in bed next to a sleeping spouse without turning a light on. (And apparently this segment is a large one.) With the Paperwhite, it is game on (and lights out)!

So, why won’t this new device resonate with educators? As has been the case throughout the history of the Kindle, improvements to the device have been made with one audience in mind: the retail consumer. And often, improvements that serve the consumer do not serve the purposes of education, as we have documented regularly in this space.

The Paperwhite is no exception. Backlighting and more pristine contrast are not features that have much relevance to school. But there are several shortcomings in the Paperwhite that are extremely relevant to educators:

1. No removable storage – You may have forgotten that the original Kindle had a slot for an SD card. For a school, the ability to load SD cards with books and then insert them into whatever Kindle device is handy is a useful feature. That way the inventory of books can be separated from the inventory of devices. The average consumer doesn’t need this, but a school librarian juggling and deploying resources does.
2. No charger included – A wall charger for the Paperwhite costs $10. Most schools will need one of these. Per device.
3. Advertisements – Ads appear on the standard Paperwhite, which are meant to induce buying behaviors that most educators fret about when the Kindle is in the student’s hands. Yes, they are unobtrusive and do not really interfere with the screen while reading, but there is a strong precedent that educational materials not contain advertisements. Anyone remember Chris Whittle and Channel One? If you want to remove them, that’ll be $20.

I used to make the case that the Kindle 1 was the best Kindle for education. The Paperwhite doesn’t really change that opinion.

How does the competition stack up on these items? The Nook Simple Touch e-ink e-reader:

1. Has a slot for removable storage
2. Includes a wall charger with the unit
3. Does not display advertisements

‘Nuff said?

Time to Read Feature

Just a quick update on the new lineup of Kindles announced earlier this month: as ever, the new Kindle models have one key audience in mind – the individual consumer. Backlight for reading in bed, integration with a vast media library, seamless purchasing opportunities, high resolution screen, touch navigation, whiter backgrounds, the works! All improvements sought after forever by consumers. And, as a consumer, I am delighted. The best thing for consumers is the constant increase in value that the whole Kindle line offers. To think, I am the owner of two Kindles that I paid $369 for apiece just a few short years ago! The refinement of the e-reader into a powerhouse gadget is something of which that Amazon can be rightly proud.

As usual, Amazon has also done some things with the new devices that incidentally benefits educators and their students. Two features that are actually groundbreaking in terms of impact on the instructional area most directly impacted by e-readers, reading instruction, are these:

1. “Time to Read” – This little addition, deemed annoying by some, is actually something that reading teachers and coaches can put to great use–an “on-the-fly” measure of reading speed to accompany all the measures of comprehension that are available in our test-crazy world. If you can measure speed and comprehension, you are getting close to a measure of fluency, which is truly the dark matter of the reading universe. Not the kind of fluency that is measured by reading aloud, but the kind of fluency that speaks to how easily the brain cuts through text and makes meaning of it all on the fly. Mike Sanford at NeoLithix and I used to wax rhapsodic about the potential for an e-reader to capture digital data about the pace at which a child is reading. That is exactly the data that a teacher doesn’t have when working with a roomful of kids, especially when the bulk of their reading takes place outside the classroom to begin with.

2. “Immersion Reading” on the Kindle Fire HD provides the ability to synch professionally narrated audio from Audible.com with the text on the screen of a Kindle. Again, sort of a “holy grail” for reading educators who understand that building fluency and comprehension may require audio support for reading, particularly in the case of struggling older readers who never had a modeled fluent reader sharing books with them when they were young. The evidence for the effectiveness of this strategy is definitive, if little known. But kids who have been read to regularly outperform those who haven’t by quite a margin for quite a period of time. The old “text to speech” function of e-readers like the Kindle works this way, but may actually do more harm than good because the inevitable mispronunciations and odd rhythms of text to speech do not provide the model that students need. So, the ability to synch professional narration with the text on an e-reader device makes a proven instructional strategy much easier for a teacher to implement. That strategy used to require tapes or CDs, batteries, players, print books, wires–all a bit much to incorporate into the classroom in a “frictionless” fashion. How it works from Amazon is here.

So, hooray. Along the way, teachers and kids benefit, if they can sidestep all the commercial sideshows like on-screen advertising, one-click ordering, and the like. But the judgment here is the same as it has ever been, the incredible power and value of the Kindle far outweighs the negatives when it comes to making more books available to more kids with more tools than at any time since the first half of the fifteenth century.

Photo courtesy of Survival Guide.