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!

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.

After canceling out of the blogs I’ve been reviewing before the “free trial” ended, I signed up for another batch.  One I find to be very interesting, Stanley Fish’s blog Think Again from the New York Times.  It looks like Fish, a professor at Florida International University in Miami, and whose book Surprised by Sin: The Reader in Paradise Lost I read as an undergraduate, posts once a week to this blog, which carries the subtitle “Stanley Fish and the Analysis of Reasoning.”

When I fired up the Kindle this morning, the first post that appeared was Fish discussing a question of genuine interest to educators: should teachers be permitted to wear campaign buttons while they are at work?  The New York City Board of Education, apparently, says no.  In Illinois, college professors are banned from displaying bumper stickers that signal political preferences.

As seems to be his habit, Fish deconstructs the issue point by point.  It is worth the read just to see how he juxtaposes first amendment claims against the right of an educational institution to “maintain good order and discipline” in their schools.

More to the point: the reading is even better at font size #4 in my big comfy chair rather than sitting at the computer, thanks to the Kindle.

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.

Can’t do it.

If you hit scroll the select wheel up to a line on a page of text that you are reading and click it, a menu will pop up that offers the option to “Add Highlight.” When you click that selection, the Kindle will place a highlight line above the line of text you clicked on, and will ask you in a box at the top of the page to “Select the range of text to highlight.” There’s the rub. If all the text you want to highlight is visible, fine. But if the passage you want to highlight runs onto the next page, you have a problem.

Here’s the workaround. Assuming you are reading in a font size larger than #1 (my personal favorite is #4), reduce the font size to the smallest available–that will pull more text onto the active page. With any luck, you will now be able to highlight all the text you are interested in.

Otherwise, you will have to highlight each passage separately. Remember that the highlight (along with clippings) will be saved in your Clippings file in .txt format, so you can download those highlights at any time onto your PC and recombine them if necessary.