Sunday 30 September 2012

Kindle in the Classroom

Are you twisting technology to use it to its fullest potential? 


This post is going to highlight the various ways one can access books on kindle and have a wealth of information and knowledge at the fingertips.I always felt that we as teachers have to change , evolve and redesign our teaching pedagogy every year, to customize the needs of the digital generation. It is befitting if we could use the mobiles, tablets and the laptops given to our students in a better way to suit their study habits and at the same time achieve the desired benefits. 

Well Kindle apart from being just a range of tablets with lots of pre loaded and downloadable books has also an application part to it. So those who do not have kindle devices still can have the access to all those thousands of books in kindle on any devices that they have. Yes the good news is that also on a laptop.

Again being an IB Physics teacher, I always keep looking for stuff infused with technology that can help me, my students and also my two sons who are now in MYP 1 and 2.  So an overview of how kindle can be merged into the curriculum in Sciences that we deal with in MYP and DP. 

In Sciences, the scientific method of research and experimentation skill is an important one that we try to develop in the students. At the same time we need to connect our content to various other disciplines and hence an updated awareness of the happenings in all the branches of Sciences is a boon for teachers. Moreover to infuse TOK into the content is another important aspect of classroom delivery in the IB. 

Keeping all this in mind and the time crunch that we always have, I find kindle ebooks an easy and economic means to have access to wonderful books. And till now I have not paid anything for the books so thats wonderful.

Well the above are the books in my Kindle library that I us for my classes as reference. The best are the CK-12 series which are updated constantly.

Few advantages that these books have:
  1. They can open up as e-books in your laptop, tablets and mobile devices, so reading on the go
  2. All the interfaces have wonderful dictionary to look up to the meaning of any word or phrase
  3. Highlighting option with short notes to have all important parts sorted at one place.
  4. And most of them is free or available at a throw away price. 
  5. All the books sync in all the devices that one use 
So those who have not tried it till now, just start off:

If you are a laptop/mobile/tablet  user..
  1. Visit http://www.amazon.com/ and make an account to open up a new world.
  2. Go to kindle ebooks
  3. Search the category of books and add to your library or send to your android/apple device.
  4. Download it into the device
  5. At the same time get Kindle cloud reader from the chrome web store for laptops
  6. OR download Kindle for PC and sync and download books for offline reading



Kindle ebooks that can be used as references to support the teaching of IB Sciences...

In this context I would like to mention that some books which I found of great use ,especially for the middle school and the high school are the CK-12 series of books which really highlights various aspects of scientific research skills. Moreover this series of books explains what goes behind developing a theory or a law and the differences between these and hypothesis. Interspersed are innovative practical demonstrations.




And of course lots of fiction and non fiction story books and novels for my sons in MYP to explore.So what are you waiting for? Whatever device you have just make an account in Amazon, start using the resources and share your experiences with the worrld.

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