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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Web 2.0 has beguiled us to forsake our old offline apps and turn to the online cloud for more and more of our data needs. CNET’s Buzz Out Loud podcast proclaimed that “Offline is the New Online” when Google Gears came out in 2008. Our email files are no longer downloaded into a desktop app like Outlook via POP3– now we get a browser’s eye view of our data on a remote server in real time. Netbooks, stripped down laptops whose appeal relies largely on web-based applications, are the new hot devices. Our newspaper companies are going bankrupt as we favor online RSS readers, but what about when we go offline?

I have started taking the Bay Area’s underground BART train to work, and ever since I have been obsessed with finding offline ways to work with my data. Especially RSS feeds, email, and twitter links are a challenge to work with, but I wonder what other online/offline travails people are having?

I tried syncing my Google Reader with Google’s Gears plugin and found that RSS feeds often link out to the originating site for the full story. This led me to research which news sites have full-text enabled RSS feeds, and I only found a few (including the Guardian.co.uk, Gawker websites like Lifehacker and io9, and some WordPress-powered blogs).

I’m starting to get into syncing my Thunderbird and/or Gmail for offline use, but I’m often thwarted when I receive links to outside sites whose content I cannot view. Twitter would be another great service to read on the train, but again, the links are half the fun.

I am discovering that there are a whole host of interesting Adobe Air Apps that specialize in giving you offline access to your online data. I just used Flump to download my Flickr library, Netbook to access Project Gutenberg offline, and Birdie to see my Twitter tweets offline.

Are you also interested in seeing your online data when you are stuck underground? How do you go about connecting with the online world?

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In my literature classes, I found that one of the biggest challenges for students when they sit down to write a paper is finding good quotes from the text. A great solution is to put the full text of a novel on your website (or at least link to one). Students can then use their browser’s “Find Word” function (Ctrl+F on Win or Cmd+F on Mac) to search for main Keywords.

You can see above that I searched the text of Crime and Punishment for “agony” and can then find every instance in the book where that word appears. I find this really helps kids review main themes and find the most relevant quote easily.

You can find most classics at Gutenberg.org, Bibliomania.com, or by googling “full text” and the name of your novel.

Another way is to put a passage from the book in quotes in your google search, such as “My watch was still
unwound, and I am rigorously accustomed to wind it the last
thing before going to bed, and many such details.” (remember: the quotes make it so that you find this exact phrase). The likelihood that these words appear together outside of the desired text is nearly nil.

By making the full text available, you can move from students who slavishly insert the first quote they see– because they lack the stamina to search through page after page of quotes– towards students who are making critical decisions about a few easy-to-find choices.