EduKindle

The popularity of Notepad for Kindle got me thinking about another utility that I’d like on my Kindle, a calendar utility.

With Notepad getting decent reviews, I thought, why not?. Mary Krieg wrote a comment, saying “I now have the Personal Notepad on my Kindle. It is fantastic! You truly designed a program that is both simple to use and yet so practical. Thank you!” And then Steve Shaw, who runs the Kindlelicious blog, wrote: “What a great idea! Thanks for posting this.” Kinda heady praise for a piker like me.

Len Edgerly called Notepad “the first Kindle Utility” in the “Tech Tip” portion of his weekly podcast at The Kindle Chronicles. Hmm, I thought, pretty cool.

A little further thought and Calendar for Kindle was born. This one took a little longer to create–multiple pages with a Table of Contents, a list of major dates for the year, and a “personal calendar” page, based on the format I created with Notepad–so I put Calendar up for sale at Amazon for $1.99 (my take: seventy cents per). Then I also realized that a user could keep their personal dates from year to year by saving the .mbp file locally before installing the new calendar for the following year. Cool beans.

So I offer it to friends at EduKindle for free on the Downloads page. Please leave a comment if you have an idea to add or a feature to request. Enjoy!

Half of what I lug with me on a plane or train is stuff from work that I have to read. Much of it is Word documents, some PDFs. My goal was to see how much of this paper I could convert for the Kindle.

This is as easy as it gets. You just email your document to the folks at Kindle and they will convert it and send it back to your Kindle wirelessly, all for the exorbitant fee of ten cents. That’s right, a dime. You can send a Word document and certain kinds of PDFs to yourname@kindle.com and they will shoot it back onto your Kindle in a jiffy (really, mine was there as soon as I checked for it a minute or two later), or you can send the document to yourname@free.kindle.com, and they will email the converted document right back to you at no charge. Just connect the USB and drag it into the “documents” folder on your Kindle.

This is a great book for educators, full of stories about how to get your message across in ways that people will remember. The book is full of terrific examples from the classroom, and offers a great discussion starter for teacher book groups or professional development through books, something that Education Week recently reported as a growing trend. You can download the Introduction and Index for free; the Introduction covers all of the key “sticking techniques” elaborated in the rest of the book. What is also cool is that individual chapters are also available for the Kindle for $2.39 each, and the whole book for the typical $9.99. The Introduction alone is worth the read.