Daily Education and Technology News for Schools 07/06/2013
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Amazon.com: Customer Discussions: How do I view "real" page numbers on my Kindle books?
There continues to be a problem that not all books in the Amazon kindle store have real page numbers. If students are expected to cite sources and not allowed to use location numbers, then Amazon can expect the pushback seen on this forum post. Meanwhile, a helpful person on the forum has noted how you can know what to read on the Kindle if your professor or teacher says "read page 80-92" - you can dive into the table of contents on the website and save a copy. This is the only solution. It is time for Amazon to get their act together and have all Kindle ebooks display page numbers if there is a printed copy of the book. If there is not a printed copy of the book, there needs to be a consistent reference point or "page" that all can use for sourcing and citing content. "1. Look up the book in the in the Amazon Kindle store (where you purchased it). 2. Click on the book where it says "Look Inside." You want to look at the table of contents, which will have the pages numbers for each chapter. 3. It defaults to the "kindle edition," which does not have the page numbers in the table of contents. However, there is a tab above that says "Print Book." Click on that. 4. Once you're on the "Print Book" display, it shows the page numbers in the TOC. By doing the above, I was able to determine that "the first 26 pages" = Chapters 1 & 2. I used Evernote to take a screen capture of the entire TOC, which I'll refer back to."
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MobileRead Wiki - Kindle Myths and Partial Truths
This is a fascinating wiki full of myths and truths about ebook readers. It says it is maintained by the users of the site. I've found it to be quiet accurate as I perused this page. If you have questions about ebooks, this is a great reference.
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Information on whispercast and how to sign up. This looks like the system for managing Kindles (you can send content to school owned kindles or personal Kindles) and in fact, you should move towards this. I don't know about moving the books you already have. I do like how you can upload pdf's etc. to distribute.
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Some rules have changed as I've been reading up on having Kindles at schools. (Back in February I read a spate of posts mentioning that Amazon said that having 6 kindles share one account was just for "personal use" and that libraries can't do it.) But Amazon does have information on Whispercast which lets you handle distributing books. It is a "free self-service online tool" and I'm thinking that it is something we need to be using. It looks like you can also distribute many of the free ebooks onto Kindles.
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Kindle for iOS update brings boost to students and visually impaired | ITProPortal.com
The recent Kindle updates over the past few months have quite a few teachers. In particular, if you have a textbook on Kindle, you can collate notes by color, which is a major enhancement. This article does a nice job of summarizing the features important to educators. "The update also brings some changes that should be especially helpful for students and teachers, like the ability to highlight long passages that span multiple pages. In addition, the Notebook feature for textbooks has new filtering options, which should help you more quickly and easily find all your notes, bookmarks, and highlights by colour"
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How to Publish an E-Book: Resources for Authors | Jane Friedman
An excellent compendium of information about writing and publishing ebooks that is continually updated by the author. Great work.
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Book Creator for iPad for iPad on the iTunes App Store
I"ve been hearing a lot of great things from teachers about Book creator as a new way they have students create reports. Called, Book Creator, children can create pages, send them to their teachers and then the teacher can put them together further.
