Epic Reading

Have you heard of Epic? In a nutshell, it's like Netflix for [children's] books, and it's free if you're an educator!

Here's a little more detail:

Features

• Access on the web and via mobile app {iOS / Android}
• 100% free for teachers and school librarians{Parents get 1 month free then pay $5/month}
• Access over 10,000 books for kids age 12 and under
• Register up to 36 students under your name
• Track reading progress of each student, including which books students read and how long they read
• Students can read the book independently or have it read to them
• Students can read an unlimited number of books each month
• Students earn badges to encourage more reading
• No ads or in-app purchases
• Pinch your fingers on any book to zoom in

Tour

The first time I logged in to the app, I was immediately directed toward a "Guest" profile {after I logged in as a teacher}, which I suppose is technically a student. Exploring this student profile, here's what I found:

Hold your device in portrait mode to see one page of the book at a time:

Holding the device in landscape mode allows the reader to see a two-page spread:

Regardless of the view, readers can always see how many pages they have left in the book by viewing the count in the bottom, center of the screen.

Need to leave the app but haven't finished the book yet? No problem. Just stick a virtual bookmark in your spot:

 

You can even bookmark multiple pages, as seen on the top of the screen below with the multiple red dots:

If the child swipes through the book too quickly, he/she gets a notification saying s/he needs to read a little longer. I was worried at first about what this would do for really fast readers, but I swiped through in probably less than a minute when I received the screen on the bottom left... Waiting just an extra minute or so allowed me to move on to the screen on the bottom right and press "finish book!"

 

When the student marks the book as "officially" complete, there's a time stamp of how long it took for the student to read it cover to cover {this information also appears in each child's reading log so the teacher can view it at a later time}.

After finishing the book, the student earn points toward his/her current level and sees suggestions for his/her next read:

Reading also earns the student rewards, such as new avatars {seen below}. The student can choose to add the book to his/her favorites, share the book with others, or rate the book on a 5-star system.

Students also see the total time it took to read the book cover to cover {this information is also displayed on each child's reading log for teachers to review at a later time}.

Finishing books allows the reader to "level up" and work toward earning more badges.

Use the "switch profile" option to switch to another student profile or the teacher's {the teacher profile can only be accessed if the teacher enters his/her password again}. View a student profile to get more information on the child's reading habits and time in Epic. Here's a student profile page:

 

From the app, the teacher can click on each individual student to quickly see how much total time each student has spent reading {and narrow that reading log down to a specific week, month, or year}, as well as which books s/he read along the way:

 

...or the teacher can view all information from the teacher dashboard on the web:

Clicking on a student's profile from the web gives more details about the time spent reading and the number of pages finished:

Finally, Epic provides free teacher resources, which include postcards, ready-made parent flyers, and an introduction video as well as a robust FAQ section that will answer all remaining Epic questions.

Do you use Epic with your students? If so, tell me what details I missed sharing! What do you like or dislike about the tool?

Chrome Extension: Print Friendly & PDF

Do any of these situations apply to you?

• You're given the task of reading an article online. You prefer physical paper, so you print the article before reading. 
• You print web articles for your students to read and/or analyze. 
• You share article links with students and/or parents. 
• You want to read an article online but find the font too small or large. 
• You have a student with a vision impairment who needs text enlarged.

If so, you'll enjoy today's post about a free Chrome extension called Print Friendly & PDF. 

Install the Extension

1. Make sure you have a Google account. {If you have a Gmail, YouTube, or Blogger account, you have a Google account. It's possible to connect an existing e-mail -- like your school e-mail -- to a Google account; ask me about that if you're interested in learning more! I definitely recommend separating personal from professional, so if you only have a personal Google account, I'd make another one specifically for school.}

2. Launch Google Chrome {download it here if you don't already have it}.

3. Sign in to your Google account on Chrome. {Click the small silhouette of a person in the top, right corner to sign in for the first time.}

4. Click here to view the Print Friendly extension page. To install it, click the blue "add to Chrome" button in the top, right corner of the pop-up box.

The Print Friendly icon will appear in the upper, right portion of your Google Chrome browser and, n most cases, will look like the first option in the list below:

You can change your icon to any of the options seen in the screenshot below by right-clicking the icon in your browser and clicking "options."

To Use

1. Open the article of your choice in Google Chrome. For demonstration purposes, I'm using this CNN article about pizza wars. :) 

2. Click the Print Friendly icon. When I clicked it while viewing the above-mentioned pizza article, I got a pop-up that looks like this:

3. Remove all images from the article in one click by using the "remove images" button at the top of the pop-up. {This is particularly useful if you're trying to conserve ink and/or if you're doing some type of project that requires the students not see the images.}

4. Increase or decrease the text size from 70% to 130% if needed:

text size is at 70%

text size is at 130%

 5. Print, turn the page into a PDF, or e-mail the article as-is:

For those with a vision impairment, it's easy to enlarge the text and either print or e-mail to the student as a PDF. I also love the idea of removing images from an article, and then asking students to draw the images they see in their brain while reading. 

If you're trying to go paperless with your class, don't worry about the printing part. You could always doctor the article however you want it, save it as a PDF, upload it to a cloud service like Dropbox or Google Drive, and use a service like Symbaloo to share the link {click here to read about 8 ways to share links with students}. 

It's a great way to save some paper or just remove unwanted portions before sharing an article with students. 

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The One All About Kindle Books

I'm a big fan of Kindle books {and Friends, as you can tell from the title of this post ;)}. Here's why:

• They don't take up physical space and won't create any stacks or clutter.
• They're easy to move when you have to change rooms or houses.
• You can read them on your Promethean in front of all your students {just go to the Kindle cloud reader on your laptop, which should be connected to your Promethean}.
• They're much easier to search through and find what you're looking for. {The Kindle Cloud Reader gives you the ability to search your library, view the covers, sort your books in whichever way you choose, etc.} 

Like everything else, I have a personal account and a school account. My school Amazon account intentionally has no credit card attached to it so that I can feel okay about handing my iPad to a kid without fearing that he/she will be purchasing Amazon goods on my behalf. :) 

Although our district officially adopted iPads, there is a Kindle iOS app you can utilize. I only loaded my school Kindle account on my teacher iPad, so I encourage you to review Amazon's policies if you're considering putting it on student iPads {click here to go to the Amazon Support page}. 

How to Display Kindle Books on the Promethean {or Other Projector}

1. Go to read.amazon.com and sign in with your school Kindle account. 

2. Choose to enable offline reading if you want.

3. You should see the following on your laptop screen, which would, of course, be displayed on your Promethean if it's hooked up properly:

• Yellow arrow: toggle the view of your books between list view {the one on the right} and grid view {the one on the left and the view you see above}
• Orange arrow: sort the view by the most recently added, author's name, or title of the book
• Green arrow: refresh the view, adjust settings/get help, and search {which will be your BFF once you've accumulated a decent amount of books}
• Blue arrow: toggle the view of all books you've ever put into your Kindle cloud or just the books you've downloaded to that device
• Purple arrow: click on any of the books to open it up and start reading
• Pink arrow: increase or decrease how many books are shown on the screen by making your search results smaller or larger

How to Get Discounted or Free Kindle eBooks 

When I taught K-4 Science Lab, I would browse for free science eBooks every day while I ate my lunch. Really, once you browse the entire list one day, it doesn't take that long to look for newly added books on days after that. And it's totally worth it to get free books!

1. Amazon has a list of free books here. 
2. Amazon features daily deals where prices are reduced.
3. TCEA members can sign up for updates each day about free and on sale Kindle books and iOS apps; a daily digest is e-mailed to you each morning.
4. Book Bub will send you a list of free and reduced-priced eBooks each day.
5. Some places -- like Blogging for Books or Net Galley -- offer teachers librarians, and bloggers the opportunity to get books for free in exchange for a review. If you're a blogger, the review is obviously supposed to be posted on your blog, but teachers and librarians are just required to submit a review to the publisher. If you sign up to review kids' books, you've just gotten free books for the price of a little of your time! Bonus: sometimes those books haven't been released to the public yet and/or haven't been fully edited...wouldn't it be great editing practice to have your students edit pages from an actual book?

How to Give a Kindle eBook as a Gift

The most obvious reason why you might want to do this is if you're giving a Kindle eBook to someone, but I actually use it to "gift" books to my school account {the one with no credit card attached, so I couldn't purchase anything on it} from my personal account, too. 

1. To gift a Kindle book, just head over to the book's Amazon page. {Here's the homepage of Kindle books, in case you want a quick-link.} You should see this menu on the right:

2. Click the "give as a gift" button. You'll see this screen:

Notice that you can enter the e-mail address of the recipient or choose to have the gift e-mailed to you so you can forward it to the recipient later. You can also delay the delivery of the Kindle book to the date of your choice, much like an Amazon gift card. 

Your credit/gift card is charged for the book, and the recipient gets an e-mail that looks like this:

I'm so private online that I rarely put anything but my initials when signing up for a website, which is why it says my name is "CK." :)

The recipient has to click the yellow "get your gift now" button, and he/she will be taken to the Amazon page for that eBook.

The blacked out portion is blocking my school e-mail address, which is where I sent this Kingle book to myself.

From there, the recipient only needs to click the yellow "accept Kindle gift" button to put the book in their cloud account.

You, the giver, also receive an e-mail saying the gift was accepted and applied to the recipient's account so you know they actually got it.

{P.S. Click here to learn how to easily save money while shopping online.}

How to Help Students Find Books They Like

As a bookworm, I've always been of the belief that people who don't like to read just haven't found the right book yet. :) Here are a few tools you can use for kiddos who can't seem to find anything they like to read:

1. Scholastic Book Wizard {available in The App Store and Google Play Store, too!}

This search is best for students who know of a subject or topic they might be interested in reading about, but they don't know of any specific books they've enjoyed or might want to read.

In the "all books" section, just type a title, author, or keyword and click the red "find books" button. 

If the student has a favorite book and wants to find something similar, click that middle tab labeled "search for similar books," type the name of the book, and click the green "find similar books." 

Then you can narrow down the results by reading level, interest level, theme/subject, or genre {not pictured below because there were no options listed under "genre" for my searched title"}. I searched for The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown and got 20 search results.

Here's a link to the FAQs about the mobile version. 

2. Book Seer

This search engine is best for students who have enjoyed at least one book in the past. 

Type in the name of a book you enjoyed {and the author}, and Book Seer generates a list of similar books from Amazon. I typed in Hop on Pop by Dr. Seuss and got these results:

3. What Should I Read Next?

This search engine is also good for students who have enjoyed at least one book in the past.

My search for The Invention of Wings by Sue Monk Kidd pulled up over 50 search results.  

ELA teachers, this might be a great way to kill two birds with one stone during that first week of school; kids will get to search for some books they start the year reading {and what a good opportunity to also teach them how to find what they need in the library!}, plus you'll get to know each student a little better based on which books they choose to read. 

Taking it a step farther with tech integration:

1. Back-to-school project: showcase 5 books that describe your personality. Use ThingLink, Tackk, or Shadow Puppet Edu to create a collage, poster, or slideshow of the book covers. Students can type or orally narrate how they relate to each book.

2. Reading Goals: which 5 books do you plan to read next, and why? ThingLink, Tackk, and Shadow Puppet Edu would work well for this project, too. 

3. Like suggestion #1 or 2 but don't have time to integrate a full project? No problem. Use Answer Garden to let students put titles and authors on the board and try to find common ground with classmates.  

4. Book Reviews: students can record themselves reviewing a book on something like Shadow Puppet Edu, Seesaw, or Croak.it. Link the recording to a QR code and place the QR codes on a bulletin board or even on the back of each book in your classroom library.