eBooks for Kids that Read Themselves

I've just spotted this wonderful online library for young learners called MeeGenius. It has a great collection of classic stories and fairy tales that are delivered as illustrated online books.

The library is very easy to navigate, just click on the book you want. You can personalise the books my selecting the names of the characters in the book, though you have to register to save these, or just read through by clicking on the button to read and clicking to turn pages.

You can also click on the 'Play' option and when you do this you hear the book being read to you with the words being highlighted as you hear them.
This is a great site to help younger learners with their reading. the stories are ones that will probably be familiar from their L1 anyway and this combined with the audio support and word highlighting should really help not only with their reading but also their listening skills and pronunciation.

There is also a mobile app for iPhone- iPad - iTouch, but it isn't free (the website is free). I bought it for about 2 euros and it works pretty effectively. You still have to download each book before you read it, so this is best done on a wireless connection (so you aren't paying mobile rates) but it is then stored on your device until you want to read it.

The site and the app are really good recommendations for parents if you want to advise them on how to support their kids learning development and help them to read with the kids.

I hope you find MeeGenius useful.

Related links:

• 3D Computer Games with Young Learners
• Get Rid of Embarrassing Ads
• Bring Your Kids Drawings to Life
• A Web Browser Designed for Kids
• A Virtual Language Learning World for Kids

Best

Nik Peachey

Create Books for the IPad

ePub Bud is a free tool for creating books for the iPad. It does this in a number of ways. Either you can send a book to the company and they say they will digitize it for free, you can upload an existing digital copy and it will be converted on the site, or you can use the WYSIWYG interface to write straight into the site.

I tried uploading my Web 2.0 Tools for Teachers manual from the PDF format and this is what it came out like. You can download it from here if you are lucky enough to have an iPad Web 2.0 Tools for Teachers iPad edition

The process of uploading it was pretty simple. Once you are registered you just click on 'Upload', locate the file in the usual way and click again to upload it. Once the file is uploaded, it takes a short while to convert it to the format for iPad.

When it has been converted the status will change from 'unprocessed' to 'Converted to ePub'. You can then share the link with anyone who wants to read your materials or book on their iPad. You can set privacy status on the file and add tabs and index it. You can even edit the file once it's uploaded using the on site WYSIWYG.

This is a great way to convert content for use on the iPad. It doesn't have to be books of course, you could also use it for worksheets, or notes for your students or books or stories they have created themselves.

It's also worth checking out the books that are already there too as there is quite a collection. The focus seems to be mainly on children's books at the moment. Have a look in the 'browse' section and see if anything takes your fancy.

Now all you need is an iPad!

Related links:

• Free ebooks on elearning
• Free Web Publishing Community
• Fantastic Free E-Books for EFL and ELT

Best

Nik Peachey

Free Web Publishing Community

I've just been checking out Scribd and I have to say I like it a lot. Scribd is a web publishing community which uses a tool that looks very similar to Flash Paper to enable users to upload and share documents ranging from single pages to complete books.


There's a really wide selection of books and documents uploaded that you can search through, and if you register, you can also start adding your own documents and projects.

The 'reader' part of the site delivers high quality at quite good speeds and you can also get an embed code so you can add the books to your site or blog and build tasks etc. around them. Here's a quick example of a short document on how to teach poetry:

Poetry is Contagious - How to Teach Poetry (Betsey Coleman) - Upload a Document to Scribd

Adding the embed code to this page took just a couple of seconds and I didn't need to register to get it. You just need to register if you want to upload documents.

If you go to Explore and look through the education section there are at least 1000 books or documents there all of which are free. Some really handy ones on teaching and also quite a few dictionaries including the Dictionary of English Slang.

Scribd is definitely a site I want to spend more time on, might even use it to make an e-book version of my Learning Technology blog.

Hope you find something useful.

Related links:

• Fantastic Free E-Books for EFL and ELT
• Free ebooks on elearning
• Free PDF Editor

Best

Nik Peachey

Fantastic Free E-Books for EFL and ELT

Wow! This is like having a complete ELT library at your finger tips and it's all free! PDF Geni is search site that gives you free access to PDF e-books all of which are freely available on the web.

It isn't limited to ELT and can be used to search for any subject. I had a look for a few things which might be useful for EFL / ESL teachers and found loads of free materials.

Check out these searches:

• Communicative language teaching
• TEFL
• Lexical approach
• Task based learning
• Teaching English

This is really useful stuff and all free.

Visit PDF Geni

Best

Nik Peachey

Free ebooks on elearning

There's a really impressive collection of free ebooks on the eLearning Guild website.

The latest one is Tips for Producing and Managing Flash-based e-Learning Content. In all there are eight ebooks there dating back to 2005 and they are all free to download.

Each book is a collection of tips and they cover topics from choosing the best LMS (learning management system) to tips on beingg an online trainer.

These all look well worth a read.

Best

Nik