Tag Archive for usability

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…

Does My Kindle Book Have Real Page Numbers?

August 23, 2016 – Update: Amazon recently introduced a feature that takes real page numbers to a whole new level. The feature is called Page Flip. It allows you to “step back” from the page you are currently reading on Kindle or Kindle Reader and navigate around the book without ever losing your place. You can…

One Little Control That Makes a Difference for Educators

One of the most consistent questions over the years about Kindle management concerns how to disable the ability to make purchases directly from the device. For educators, this is almost a show-stopper with Kindle. This uber-consumer reading device, designed with book purchases in mind, makes it just too darned easy to buy a book, and…

Getting 80 Kindles Ready for Kids

I had the pleasure of spending a day with Kathy Parker last week to learn how she sets up all the Kindles the district purchased for Seneca Grade School’s entire eighth class for the coming school year. It is quite a process! I have noted in many previous posts that the Amazon Kindle is first…

More Research Says Bigger Fonts Help Kids Read

Once I started digging in to why everyone seems to crank up the font size on the Kindle, more and more evidence has been sent my way. I want to thank Kerrie Smith, the Australian teacher and LEO at Education.au, for pointing out another significant research compilation on the importance of variable text size. This…