Even in the upper grades, students are struggling to make the transition from “learning-to-read” to “reading-to-learn”. Give a struggling reader a context-reduced novel written in old, antiquated language and you will realize that students need as much life-like context as we can provide. One way to help students access texts is to provide audio versions that they can use alongside– or even instead of– reading the text.

A great tool in this endeavor is Librivox.org, a collection of free audiobooks of classic texts created by a dedicated community of volunteers. These are mostly works that have passed into the Public Domain and are now the intellectual property of the world, so they can be used freely without fear of copyright reprisal. You can think of it as Project Gutenberg for audiobooks.

As an English teacher teaching Mary Shelley‘s Frankenstein, I wanted to make it easy for my 9th and 10th graders (a high percentage of whom received Special Ed. or 504 services) to access the text. I went to LibriVox and searched for the book, and found this useful menu:

Podcasting the Book: What it Looked Like in Class

I added links to the full text, the MP3 files, and the iTunes RSS feed to my own class website so students had a choice of how they would access the texts. I taught them how to add the sound files to their iPods and told them they had absolutely no excuses for not reading along with the class.

Many students used these resources, and in many different ways. Some would listen as they read, gaining contextual cues (such as emphasis and tone from the reader’s vocal inflection) as well as learning the proper pronunciation of words. Some students reported they could read the book while meeting responsibilities that would normally interfere with homework time, such as caring for younger siblings or after-school jobs. Students were listening to Frankenstein on the walk home or while mountain biking around Marin county’s enticing trails.

This allowed students to engage in the Higher-Order Thinking Skills (HOTS) exercises we were doing in class, irrespective of their level of literacy mastery. While this may sound backwards to those “back-to-basics’ers” who believe students should “walk before they can run”, in fact the opposite is true. Students can (and MUST!) develop their critical thinking skills, even as their literacy skills are catching up to their age-appropriate mental development.

Making audiotexts available to kids is so easy that a teacher with ANY level of tech savvy can do it. It was especially easy given that the text we were using was already in the Public Domain and was clearly legal to distribute to kids. Less legal (and much less easy) was our purchasing and sharing of CD and Audible.com audiobooks for the newer, copyrighted titles we were teaching in class. For these, I would usually crack the DRM, post the files into my school server space, and link to them from my class website. I ask you– what heartless jerk would sue a teacher for letting Special Ed. kids listen to an audiobook he legally bought? Oh yeah– the RIAA. Tread cautiously, friends.

Do you know of other great resources for audiobooks? Have you used tech to help students access texts? Please discuss in the comments!

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• Universal Design for Learning – Meeting the Needs of Learners (slideshare.net)
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• Dorian Gray review (telegraph.co.uk)
• The power of Shelley’s Frankenstein lives on – but not in Cologny (guardian.co.uk)
• With Twitter, You Can Write A Book with Neil Gaiman (smartbitchestrashybooks.com)
• Linux Friendly Audiobooks (slumpedoverkeyboarddead.com)
• The Bookmark App – Audiobooks finally done right (tuaw.com)

Since its debut in 2007, I’ve been a fanatical iPhone jailbreaker and general enthusiast of the device. As more and more iPhones have begun bogging down the 3G network in the Bay Area, Apple/AT&T seem to be taking their customers for granted (charging ever more for data, texts, and increasingly bad customer service). When I got my new 3G S this summer, I discovered that every time I’d jailbreak it, the SIM card would die and I’d have to restore it back into Apple jail to make it work. >:-( The jailbroken experience is half the fun of the iPhone, so I was pretty frustrated that Apple wouldn’t just leave all us poor hackers alone.

The final straw came when I was scheduled for a telephone job interview– I knew I couldn’t get cell coverage at my house in the Berkeley Hills, so I went down into the flats, in an open air park, with nothing between me and the cell satellites but a sunny day. The reception was so bad, the interviewer couldn’t hear what I was saying and asked to reschedule the interview when I can get to a land line phone. It was then that I knew that AT&T had to go. I called AT&T to complain AND THAT CALL GOT DROPPED. So I went into the AT&T store, demanded to be let out of my contract without a cancellation fee, and finally broke free. (Actually it took two hours of standing in the store, being transferred on the phone from manager to “manager”, but I held firm and they let me out).

I went down to Radio Shack and bought three Palm Pres– one for me and each of my parents. Since then I have been amazed that I can get through a day without a dropped call, delayed text message, or bunged up internet connection. Sprint service is great here, and the customer service people I have interacted with are generally much friendlier and more empowered to help me out. In addition, the service plan for 3 Palm Pres on a 1500 min family talk plan with unlimited text and data is under $150. Let’s see AT&T do that with 3 iPhones.

As for the device itself, it is indeed a worthy iPhone competitor. The interface is smooth and intuitive, and the fact that it can multi-task means that I can get up-to-the minute notifications when I get a new email, SMS, IM, or call. The slide out keyboard is a great tactile experience, although I am still much slower with it than I have become with iPhone’s virtual keyboard. The web browser is comparable to the iPhone’s, having the click-to-zoom and pinch gestures that make mobile HTML browsing a joy.

It’s designed not to need to be plugged into a computer– unlike the iPhone which is dependent on iTunes for its syncing and updates. The Pre does it all over the air. This is good and bad. As a Mac head, I had my Address Book, iCal, iPhoto, and iTunes all dialed in to sync to my iPhone. The Pre uses my Gmail contacts as the address book, so I had to go through my old email contacts and delete old students, colleagues, and craigslist response emails to clean up my phone’s contact list. On the positive side, I can use the Pre as a simple drag and drop USB device, putting whatever video, audio, or documents into its 8GB internal memory and being sure that they will work from inside the WebOS interface.

As a jailbreaker, I LOVE LOVE LOVE that Palm has basically said “go ahead! hack it!” There is already a burgeoning hacker movement, supplementing Palm’s nascent App Catalog with over 200 “homebrew” apps. This is a far cry from iPhone’s vibrant app scene, but AT LEAST WE HAVE A GOOGLE VOICE APP (two, in fact). Seriously, the Pre needs more developers and more apps, but the conditions for developing these things are really good. The Pre is basically a linux box with a snazzy frontend, so linux apps can easily be ported over to the device.

Even though I have only had it for two days, I am loving the freedom and quality of coverage I’m getting on the Pre. Sure, I miss all my snazzy apps, but I have faith that once developers realize that it’s so easy and safe to develop for the Pre, the apps will come through, too.

Image via Wikipedia

Everyone loves Firefox because there are so many great user-created Add-Ons that make your web browser into much, much more. Add-ons allow you to customize your browser to make tasks easier. This extra performance comes at a slight cost; the more add-ons you pile on, the more sluggishly your (formerly fast) browser becomes. Wouldn’t it be great if you could have a few different copies of Firefox– each optimized for your various tasks? Sadly, you can only run one instance of Firefox at a time. Or at least– one instance of Firefox NAMED “Firefox”. Over the years, some enterprising upstarts have taken the Firefox codebase and built new browsers on top of it.

Flock browser is geared for Web 2.0 addicts. It automatically logs into your Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Gmail– the list is enormous and ever-growing. Suffice it to say that if there ever was a browser meant for fun (not work), Flock is it.

Another Firefox-powered browser, Wyzo, is optimized for the rabid BitTorrent downloader. It has BitTorrent built in, along with an enhanced download manager, CoolIris, and some other nice updates to the original Firefox recipe.

While each browser has its own intended strengths out of the box, you can also outfit each one with the Firefox add-ons that help you get all your tasks done quickly and easily. What I’ve done is just one way to approach this, but it shows you what can be done.

Firefox

Firefox itself has become my work browser. I have to manage my (Google Apps for your Domain) email, calendars, school blog sites, to-dos, and plan lesson presentations (which for me, involves scanning through lots of photos online so I can illustrate what I want to say). My Firefox is optimized for this task with a few plugins which support these tasks:

• Xoopit for Gmail– shows you a list of all of the files, photos, videos, and attachments in your Gmail, visually
• Greasemonkey– enables me to run Better Gmail 2, Better GCal, and Better GReader from the geniuses at Lifehacker
• CoolIris- an incredible addition to any browser that allows you to see photos in a beautiful 3D interface
• XMarks- to sync my bookmarks and stored passwords between browsers and computers
• Zemanta- offers suggestions for license-safe media to add into emails and blog posts, great for SEO on blogs
• Google Gears- so I can access all these online services even when I’m offline
• ScribeFire– a blogging client inside your web browser. Perfect for dragging, dropping, commenting, and publishing from the window you work in. Also helps with SEO and works with all major blogging services

On a final note, another great reason to have several different browser is that logging into a Google service as one user basically dominates your whole browser. When I log into Firefox with my work Google Apps account, it gets very confused and buggy when I try to use my personal Gmail for online services. Better to have one browser for work, and one for play. Speaking of play…

Flock

Flock has become the official browser of my personal life. I love its sidebar which gives me at-a-glance views of my Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, Flickr, and YouTube peeps while I browse. I log in with my own personal Gmail and Yahoo email accounts so I can access Flickr, Blogger, YouTube, and GoogleEverything easily. It’s the browser I turn on when I want to do my own thing.

• Xoopit for Gmail– especially good here for scanning through videos, photos, and files people have sent me– serves as a photo album
• Feedly- A beautiful new front-end redesign for Google Reader that allows you to catch up on all your RSS news while easily sharing it with your peeps
• Greasemonkey– I love Facebook Fixer, AutoPoke, and Remove All Facebook Ads
• Mozilla Ubiquity: This gives me access to my Ping.fm status updater, rememberthemilk tasks, and any bookmarklet that I can dream up with a quick key combination
• CoolIris- an incredible addition to any browser that allows you to see video and photos in a beautiful 3D interface– here it’s a great way to scan through YouTube in a very pleasing interface
• XMarks- to sync my bookmarks and stored passwords between browsers and computers

Wyzo

I just added Wyzo to become my dedicated web design/ developer browser. Not necessarily because of anything inherent in Wyzo’s makeup, just because I needed another iteration of Firefox to fill up with all the great tools people have developed to make Firefox an awesome WYSIWYG code editor. This way, I can open up Wyzo the way someone else might open DreamWeaver.

• Firebug: huge tool for seeing the code behind websites, editing the XHTML, CSS, and JavaScript, and debugging
• Web Developer ToolBar: seems similar to Firebug but with TONS of features. It’s new to me– will learn more.
• ScribeFire– a blogging client inside your web browser. Perfect for dragging, dropping, commenting, and publishing from the window you work in. Also helps with SEO and works with all major blogging services
• ColorZilla- a little dropper tool that allows you to pick up a color and see its hex code.
• FireFTP- Free FTP in your browser. Goodbye, Dreamweaver!
• Zemanta- offers suggestions for license-safe media to add into emails and blog posts, great for SEO on blogs

So this is just one geek’s idea about how to transform the various flavors of Firefox into useful tools for your many web browsing needs. As more and more of our computing moves from the desktop onto the interwebs, we will need to have different tools to suit the different tasks we do online. Another way to do this is to create Site Specific Browsers (SSBs) with Fluid or Prism– creating little “single use” apps that do one thing really well. But that’s a lesson for another day.

This year, I talked our charter organization’s IT master into switching all our (5) schools and the main office to Google Apps for your Domain. This means that our schools don’t have to maintain their own email servers anymore…. all of the backend is provided by Google, although we still keep the our own domains (like envisionschools.org). Now our email is as powerful as Gmail and we’re all automatically linked in Google Calendars, Docs, Talk, Pages, and so on. It has enabled the organization to standardize how we communicate, and it’s an easy sell because it’s FREE to do, it improves email reliability, and it frees your IT people to work on other problems.

Since it’s free, we even rolled out email addresses for all students at our domains which has helped facilitate EVERYONE being connected to shared GDocs, Gmail, and GTalk. Here is their sales blurb

______________________________________________________________________

Google innovation. Powerful solutions. Zero investment.

Imagine
how valuable it would be if your entire campus community — students,
faculty, and staff — could share information and ideas more easily.
With Google Apps Education Edition’s free communication, collaboration
and publishing tools, including email accounts on your school’s domain
(like student@your-school.edu), you can start bringing that vision to
life. Learn more

You
can select any combination of our available tools and services and
customize them with your school’s logo, color scheme and content.
Manage your users through a web-based control panel, or use the APIs to
integrate Google Apps into your existing systems.

Best
of all, it’s all hosted by Google, so there’s no hardware or software
to download, install or maintain. You can get up and running quickly
with minimal support from your IT staff. Learn how

Communicate and connect			Collaborate and publish			Manage your services
	Gmail Email with 6.699276 GB of storage per custom email account, mail search tools and integrated chat.			Start Page Access your inbox, calendar, docs and campus info, plus search the web from one place.			Control Panel Manage your domain and user accounts online.
	Google Talk Free text and voice calling around the world.			Google Docs Create, share and collaborate on documents in real-time.			Extensibility APIs Integrate with your existing IT systems or 3rd party solutions.
	Google Calendar Coordinate meetings and school events with sharable calendars.			Google Sites One-stop sharing for team information.			Help and support Online troubleshooting and extended hours phone support for critical issues.

Learn more about the applications available through Google Apps.