EduKindle

Can’t find the expansion slot for additional memory on your Kindle 2? That’s because there isn’t one. And, as I have indicated in earlier posts, that’s not a good deal for educators.

This change seems to be part of the “closing” of the Kindle, where a sleek form factor trumps functionality. If the Kindle is to become the go-to reader of choice, it needs to be more rather than less useful; the device does not yet support folders, so keeping things on different chips was one potential way to store and organize your library. This removal of the SD slot also eliminates the possibility of a third-party vendor (I can hear the boos and hisses from Seattle) offering formatted books on a chip to readers. With 1) wifi that is hard to turn off and 2) no chip slot, you are pretty much left with the Kindle Store as your source of books.

And this is as it should be–in a retail universe.

But for schools, we need something more adaptable to different situations and uses. To the extent that the DX follows the design of the K2, it will fall far short of its promise as a device that could make sense in a classroom.

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!

I have been reading Disrupting Class on the Kindle and note that Christenson et al use a number of charts and graphs in the book.  (Is this why the book costs twice the usual price for a Kindle-enabled book?)  The resolution of the skinny-lined figures I’ve run across so far begged me to capture them and view them on a larger screen.  But how to do this?

“Save page as clipping” only preserves text, so I had to try the “screenshot” (the equivalent of “printscreen” on your PC) option.  The first thing to remember is that the screenshot can only be saved on an SD card, so if you don’t have an SD card handy, you are out of luck.  I pulled mine out of the digital camera, powered down the Kindle (important step), inserted the card (a 2-gigger), and fired the Kindle back up.

The keyboard shortcut to capture a screenshot on the Kindle is alt+shift+g.  I hit the keys and then powered down the Kindle to remove the SD card.  My PC found the screenshot in the root of the card, and I copied it to my computer.  When I opened the .gif file in my picture viewer, it was bigger and easier to read that it was on the Kindle.

If you keep a card in the Kindle, a lot of these steps would be unnecessary.  Grabbing these charts and graphs for later review using the “screenshot” function works just great.

You can find more keyboard shortcuts at MobileReads wiki.