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 Save Money Shopping Online

This time of year brings lots of shopping for most people, so I thought I'd write a post about how I save money shopping online. While you could always apply these tricks to classroom purchases such as school supplies or furniture, this obviously isn't my typical educational technology content...if this isn't your jam, feel free to skip this post and re-visit the blog later for the regularly scheduled programming. :)

I personally use all of these tools and can attest that they are legit and worth your time!

Use Coupons/Promo Codes

eBates 

• How it works: eBates partnered with almost 2,000 major retailers {click here to see the full list} to offer you cash back when you shop from those stores online. Each store offers a different percentage of cash back. I've found that the more popular a store is, the lower the percentage of cash back they offer. So, for instance, Walmart is typically 1-2% while Snapfish is typically 10% {I've found that these percentages jump during the holidays, though, which is an even bigger incentive for using eBates for holiday shopping!}. When you shop online, you simply activate your eBates before you check out. After you check out, you'll receive an e-mail telling you how much cash back you got for that particular purchase. eBates will send you cash back once a quarter -- either in the form of a mailed check or cash in your PayPal account. 
• What you do: Once you sign up for a free account {click the link to sign up with my referral code, and I will love you forever! :)}, simply activate your eBates before purchasing something online. Watch this video tutorial to see it in action. And: Here's the link to Snapfish, that photo website I use and mentioned in the video, if you want it. :)
• Bonus: There's an eBates app that sometimes offers double percentage cash back. Download the app and allow notifications on your phone. When you get a notification about double cash back from a place you needed to buy from anyway, I like to do the shopping on my laptop because it's easier to navigate, see the details of an item, etc. I always fill my shopping cart from a computer. Then I just launch my app from my iPhone, activate my eBates shopping trip to the store of my choice, and check out with what's already in my shopping cart. :) 

Honey Extension for Chrome

• How it works: When in a shopping cart online, Honey scours the web for all the coupons and promo codes floating the WWW for that store. Honey applies each one and, in the event that multiple codes work, it automatically applies the coupon that saves you the most money. 
• What you do: In the Chrome browser, add the Honey extension. Then just shop! If a pop-up does not appear on the right side of your browser when you're in an online shopping cart, that typically means there are no coupons available for that retailer. When the pop-up does appear, however, just click the gold "try codes" button, sit back, and watch it work! Watch this video tutorial to see it in action. 

Price match

Slice

• How it works: Slice tracks packages for you based on receipts sent to your e-mail inbox. It also tracks the price of things you've purchased and will alert you if the price of anything you purchased drops within a specified time. If you purchased something that dropped in price, the Slice app will compose an e-mail to customer service with the order number, original price, and new price, requesting a price match, and all you have to do is press "send!" 
• What you do: Sign up for a free account at slice.com, and download the free app {available in The App Store and the Google Play Store}.  In your settings, go to "linked inboxes/accounts" in the upper, right corner. Select an e-mail inbox to give Slice permission to scour your inbox for receipts. 

Internet Alerts

IFTTT 

• How it works: IFTTT allows you to create "recipes" of a cause and effect nature {hence, the title: "if this, then that"} so you can automate your online life. There are a ton of uses for IFTTT {partly because it links to almost 250 "channels" or other sites}, but in terms of saving money while shopping, you can set it up to alert you when a new item is posted or about price drops, depending on the retailer. 
• What you do: Create a free IFTTT account. Create a new recipe and select a trigger channel from the "commerce" section. Follow the on-screen prompts to set up the alerts of your choice. Watch this video tutorial to see it in action {this video is password protected due to personal information shared...CISD friends, the password is our plural mascot.}
• Bonus: This post gives you more details about IFTTT, and this post tells you how to use IFTTT to help you monitor the weather for recess duty.

CamelCamelCamel

• How it works: CamelCamelCamel only works with Amazon items. If you have anything on Amazon that you'd like to buy {individual items or even an entire Amazon Wish List}, you can put the URL into your CamelCamelCamel account and set an ideal price. CCC will e-mail you when the item dips to your ideal price. 
• What you do: Create a free CamelCamelCamel account. Either paste in the URL or search for a particular keyword in the search box at the top of the home page. From there, set your price and ask CamelCamelCamel to start tracking.  Watch this video tutorial to see it in action.

How to Google Search Efficiently and Effectively

A special team in my district and I all attended a day-long session with Sabba Quidwai from EdTechTeacher about a month ago. It was a great professional development experience about PBL, and I've been impressed with all the ETT presenters I've heard so far. 

That said, Sabba mentioned this seemingly small but incredibly important nugget of information about how to efficiently and effectively conduct a Google search, and I wanted to share with you!

If you were asked to find information from NY Times articles about test scores in college {but not the SATs} written between 2008 and 2010, how would you search for that? The graphic below dissects the proper search term for finding that information:

Source

Ways to tailor your Google search:

• Search only a particular site with the search term "site:"
• Use a tilde (~) to search for synonyms of a particular search term
• Use quotations (" ") to search for an exact phrase
• A dash (-) placed before a word will exclude it from the search
• Two periods (..) will show results from a range of time

This PDF from United Tribes Technical College Online will give you lots of ideas for getting more out of your Google search, and it would be great to share with older students. 

Younger students will appreciate this "How to Do Research" site from the Kentucky Virtual Library. 

References

• "Get More out of Google." United Tribes Technical College Online. Web. 17 Nov. 2015.