Originally posted by Carri-Ann Scott on February 10, 2019.
My focus for this assignment was mobile literacy, particularly eBooks and their AudioBook cousins. I am interested to see if, as an educator, I can use the fact that my students are already tech-savvy in Kindergarten to get them hooked on reading and what benefits the advent of eBooks and then AudioBooks will have on their learning.
With a 6-minute time limit, this is really just an introduction. I would love to investigate this further.
I hope you will also find a little bit of entertainment value in the audio recording. My goal was to add a bit of humour to a somewhat dry presentation.
REFERENCES:
Abram, Stephen. (2010). P-books vs. ebooks: Are there education issues? For the first time in my professional life, I see a huge, complex debate about the future of learning, libraries, and content involving more stakeholders than ever before, possibly in history.(THE PIPELINE). Multimedia & Internet@Schools, 17(6), 13-16.
Audio Publishers Association. (2019). Sound Learning. Retrieved February, 2019, from https://www.audiopub.org/sound-learning
Biancarosa, & Griffiths. (2012). Technology Tools to Support Reading in the Digital Age. The Future of Children, 22(2), 139-160.
Ciampa, K. (2012). Electronic Storybooks: A Constructivist Approach to Improving Reading Motivation in Grade 1 Students. Canadian Journal of Education, 35(4), 92-136.
Deasley, S., Evans, M., Nowak, S., & Willoughby, D. (2018). Sex Differences in Emergent Literacy and Reading Behaviour in Junior Kindergarten. Canadian Journal of School Psychology, 33(1), 26-43.
Gray, H. Joey, Davis, Phillip, & Liu, Xiao. (2012). Keeping up with the Technologically Savvy Student: Student Perceptions of Audio Books. Schole: A Journal of Leisure Studies and Recreation Education, 26(2), 28-38.
Herther, Nancy K. (2011). Ebooks everywhere: The digital transformation of reading. Searcher, 19(6), 22-31.
Rowe, A. (2018, September 04). Audiobooks Are Officially The Publishing Industry’s 2018 Trend. Retrieved January, 2019, from https://www.forbes.com/sites/adamrowe1/2018/08/31/audiobooks-are-officially-the-publishing-industrys-2018-trend/#663cad865e8f
The following e-textbook discussed is used in English as a Second Language classes or English as a Foreign Language classes. These are some improvements to e-textbooks in 2023 or possibly some points that were not discussed in the previous thread in 2020.
1. Availability of recordings and answers: Students can repeat the recordings in their own time and do the exercises. They can also view the answers afterwards.
2. Homework: Some textbooks have dedicated apps and within the app the students can register in a class. The teacher can now assign homework in e-textbooks and students can see pending and completed assignments on their end.
3. Generation of practice exam questions: I’ve used a book called Ready for C1 Advanced. It is a book dedicated to prepare students for the Cambridge Advanced Exam. Within the downloadable app, students have access to extra practice tests to further hone their exam taking skills. With this, gone are the days where students need to purchase an extra book in order to access supplementary material.
With the accessibility of e-textbooks, things that can be done in class like listening to audios can be done by the students themselves. This begs the question how can instructors use the extra time in class to do meaningful activities with the students? For example, with the listening component of the lesson done at home, the students are now able to do vocabulary exercises in order to apply the some new words from the listening exercise in conversation or writing.
What made me want to include this post by Carri-Ann Scott was the option of ebooks and audiobooks also being used as e-textbooks and in particular the options like those hosted on Openstax (https://openstax.org/) as an OER (Open Educational Resource) being free to download and use. They thus add the dimension of increasing accessibility to good quality textbooks for students. This can be a game-changer for many as textbooks are often expensive and not all schools (definitely not universities) provide them for free. I have heard horrible stories of school children waiting an entire academic year for a delivery of textbooks that never came. Many of these platforms offer not only a pdf download of their textbook but they can also be accessed over a mobile app and Kindle.
Has anyone used an e-textbook before? I think the design might not have been perfected as yet- it’s not quite the same experience as using a physical copy of a textbook but I think they are getting better and what I particularly like are the options available for teachers and other educators to add in their own explanations and examples into some of these ebooks.
Hi Carla,
eBooks and audiobooks are great resources, and I have many of both – I think my main reason to get an iPad all those years ago was because of iBooks. One iPad can hold a whole library and I can read or listen to anything, anywhere as long as I have it downloaded. During this time of remote teaching, I have shared with my students a Chemistry textbook from opentextbc.ca, which is also an OER. Using eBooks as textbooks is where the future of education lies, I believe. However, as they stand, most eBook versions of textbooks are just digital versions of their text counterparts, maybe with added note, comment, highlighting features added for some interactivity. If we think about Puentedura’s SAMR model, some existing versions of eBooks may reach the M – Modification, but I have not seen any reach the R – Redefinition point yet. The eBooks are good tools of enhancement but they aren’t transforming education – yet! I have high hopes though. Some of the e-texts that I have seen do a decent job of incorporating resources and hyperlinks to videos for demos within the text, however, I think where eBooks should be headed is towards being more interactive and immersive experiences. For example, I do not want to click on links to be taken to other websites where the videos or resources are hosted. I want my e-text to have those resources embedded within them. Otherwise I may as well stick with the older paper version and look up the links myself. Within iBooks, when you hold or highlight a word, it gives you different options to define or look up the word – e-texts can have that functionality, too. The practice questions should be answerable and graded within the text, with feedback, if the answers are incorrect, on how to solve them correctly. The thing is, this technology already exists in standalone digital resources, but I think these are baby steps towards a future of e-texts that can be even more sophisticated, eventually with AI to pick up on what concepts a student is struggling with most and suggest further resources for them. What do you think?
Hi Binal, those are some great ideas and to ride the wave of your inspiration of incorporating known digital resources into an e-textbook, why not include podcasts for an auditory learning experience or see the construction of a textbook that follows a micro-learning design (we know many students struggle with large volume textbooks and would prefer information in manageable bite-sized chunks), this could potentially also make the textbook more mobile friendly and AI could analyze built in quizzes to give real-time feedback on progress to the student and teacher. All options I hope we will get to see in the future. Even more adventurous would be to envision a VR or AR component in the textbook. All amazing ideas but I do still hope that they stay accessible, the trend seems to be that as more technology gets added to a resource, the more data heavy that resource becomes and potentially a cost gets added to access the resource as developers would want to recuperate their investments.