Kindle Classroom Project update, 4/4/2013

Posted on by Mark Isero

comebackkingsfavicon Spring is here, and that means it’s time for another Kindle Classroom Project update. Although Kindle donations have slowed down, there are a number of exciting things to report.

1. The project launched its second classroom.
A few months ago, a friend and generous donor asked me, “Why don’t you think bigger?” At the time, I was happy with the Kindle Classroom Project remaining as a singular noun. But then tons of Kindles arrived, so I had to rethink the project’s scale.

This Monday, a second set of ninth graders — this time in San Francisco — got their Kindles. I can’t wait to share pictures, profiles, and more. It took several hours over Spring Break to get the devices ready for deployment, but it’s so much fun. The teacher leading the project emailed me on Monday night and said the students are very excited to read.

2. There are now 43 Kindles in the collection.
In the last update about a month ago, there were 41 Kindles. March added two more Kindles, and I am very grateful, particularly because they’re from generous people from far away.

Kindle #42, a Kindle Keyboard, came from Marc in Minnesota. He found us by doing a Google search and filling out the form on the Kindle Classroom Project page.

Kindle #43, a Kindle Fire, came from Chris in Louisville, Kentucky. She also found us via the Internet. (The Internet is a beautiful thing.) Her Fire came not just with a came but also a kind and encouraging note for the student recipient.

3. There are now 232 books in the collection.
Part of expanding to a second classroom meant that I wanted to make sure that each of the 18 new Kindlers had something perfect to read right when they got their new Kindle.

So I splurged and invested about $100 to build the ebook library. (Comeback Kings, above, was one that I bought.) That money, along with donations, increased the total number of titles to 232 from 197. Yep, that means the library grew by 35 titles — or by 18 percent, if you like percentages.

This is important. Kindles are great, but good books might be even more important to the growth of the project. I’ve read in several places (including from Kelly Gallagher) that a good classroom library has 20 titles per student. This means that if there are 43 students using Kindles, there should be 800+ good titles in the ebook library.

4.  Generous contributors are donating physical books, too.
Although I encourage students to read on Kindles (for many reasons), some prefer physical books. In addition, until we attain a 1:1 Kindle-to-student ratio, we need to make sure physical classroom libraries are bursting with real-life, made-with-paper, physical books.

To that end, last week I wrote a post that named a few books that African American boys want to read. To encourage people to donate, I mentioned the Kindle Classroom Project’s Amazon Wishlist (all student requests).

Then came the books — nine so far. The funny (and sometimes challenging part) is that sometimes, there’s no way to figure out the donor. The books often arrive with no receipt or packing list. (There are worse problems in life.)

Thank you to Michele (San Francisco, CA), LeAnne (Fremont, CA), Denise (Alpharetta, GA), and Angela (Concord, CA) for all the great reading material! All four of them are repeat contributors. They’re not happy — oh no, they’re not — with donating just once.

5. I won a $250 grant for books.
Every once in a while, I search online for quick and easy ways to get grants and build the project. And every once in a while, I’m successful. Yes, $250 isn’t too much, but it’ll get 25 more ebooks, and I’m pretty happy about that.

* * *
What do you think will happen next at the Kindle Classroom Project? Will an anonymous donor click on the bright green button at the top of the page and make a huge contribution?

Or will Amazon find us here and donate a class set of Kindles?

Please let me know your predictions. favicon

reading

5 books that African American boys want to read

Posted on by Mark Isero

favicon I’ve updated the Kindle Classroom Library Wishlist on Amazon to reflect some recent requests that I’ve received from African American boys.

Here they are:

Our America: Life and Death on the South Side of Chicago
by Lealan Jones
$14.44 (paper), not available on Kindle

The Beast
by Walter Dean Myers
$5.46 (paper), not available on Kindle

A Hope in the Unseen: An American Odyssey from the Inner City to the Ivy League
by Ron Suskind
$10.87 (paper), $11.99 (Kindle)

The Pact: Three Young Men Make a Promise and Fulfill a Dream
by Sampson Davis
$10.88 (paper), $12.99 (Kindle)

There Are No Children Here: The Story of Two Boys Growing Up in The Other America
by Alex Kotlowitz
$10.88 (paper), $11.99 (Kindle)

* * *

Pretty good titles, don’t you think? It’s not a surprise to me that most are nonfiction (in general, boys prefer true stories). I’ve read all the books and am impressed by how they’ve remained important over time (especially There Are No Children Here, which was featured in last month’s This American Life).

I’m hoping that you, Faithful Iserotope Readers, will get the word out so some of these books can reach my students’ hands. (Hey, that’s in color!)

You’ll note that I’ve listed both physical and electronic formats if available in case donors want to help me achieve my quest for classroom library mirroring. The Amazon wishlist makes things easy: The ebooks go straight to my email, and the physical books get shipped to my address. (And yes, Kindle books are now becoming more expensive than their physical counterparts. Oh my. I don’t know what to think of that.)

If you don’t want to buy those books but still want to make a donation to reading, you can check out the other books on the wishlist or go to the Contribute page or click the green “Promote reading!” button on the top right.

And if you’d like to share this: See those cute little icons below this post? You can email this post or share it to tons of different places — like Facebook and Google+ and Twitter and LinkedIn and Pinterest (and more).

Thank you, as always, for caring about young people and their reading lives. favicon

reading/technology

Bookish helps students find good books to read

Posted on by Mark Isero

 

bookish_logo1

favicon I’ve found a neat newish website that can help teachers help students find good books to read.

Bookish includes a nifty recommendation feature. You type in a book you’ve loved. The system spits out a book you might like.

Here’s what it looks like:

Screen Shot 2013-03-27 at 3.55.19 PM
I think it works pretty well. When I typed in The Fault in Our Stars, I got The Perks of Being a Wallflower. When I typed in Snitch, I got Give a Boy a Gun. When I typed in Perfect Chemistry, I got When You Were Mine.

These are solid recommendations that students will find helpful. After all, some students have trouble finding their next book. And some want to discover their own books, rather than relying on their teacher or their peers. Bookish offers these students another option.

A couple neat features: First, you can enter up to four books into the recommendation engine, which improves the search. Second, each book choice includes a blurb, and some even offer first-chapter samples.

In my view, Bookish is a simple, easy-to-use tool that will help connect students with good books. Try it out! favicon

reading

Why classroom library mirroring is important

Posted on by Mark Isero

favicon I’ve written before about my goal of classroom library mirroring.

What’s that, you ask?

Classroom library mirroring means that every book that you have in your physical classroom library is also ready for students to read on their Kindles.

So if a title is on the shelf, it’s also on the Kindle — and vice versa.

There are many benefits of mirroring. The three biggest ones are:

  1. More than one student can read the same book at the same time,
  2. Physical books don’t get lost or damaged because they stay on the shelf,
  3. Students get the benefits of browsing (the colorful covers! the blurbs on the back!) for a book without all the painful side effects of checking one out. (Yes, say goodbye to all library checkout systems!)

I can see why some students (and teachers, and parents) might rebel against classroom library mirroring. After all, it’s pretty aggressive (and I’d love to hear your thoughts about it).

“You mean that I can’t read real books?” a student may ask.

Right now, I’m not ready to say what I want to say, which is, “Nope. You can’t read real books. But you can look at them here on the shelf and read them on your Kindle. And if you can’t deal with that, then try your public library!”

But I’d like to become bold enough to follow through with what I know is the right answer.

In order to get there, I need to make sure that true mirroring occurs. It’s not easy. Here is a case study of what I’m talking about:

Can you tell the big difference between the two photos? Yep, one of the physical books has an ebook counterpart, whereas the other doesn’t.

This happens a lot. My physical classroom library contains more than 500 books, while my ebook library has 205 titles. There’s a big gap there. The reverse is true as well. There are some books that are on the Kindles but not on the shelves. A generous donor may buy a title in one format but not in the other.

It’s time for me to make the investment to mirror the two libraries. It’ll be a big project. Three hundred books, after all, will cost around $3,000. This project might take a couple years, but I’m willing to be patient. After all, ebooks aren’t going away anytime soon, even if ereaders change and get fancier.

I also need to make sure to buy both formats of a book when a student makes a request. In other words, if a student wants to read The Future of Us, and I’m pretty sure that the title will be popular, my policy should be to order both the physical and ebook versions. For $20, the title is now available to all students forever. Not too shabby.

One more thing: an organizational challenge. Each ebook needs to be available to all students, but each title, according to Amazon policy, can be shared by only six devices at once. This has never been a problem so far, but it’s possible that more than six students at the same time would want to read the same book.

What do you think about my mirroring idea? Is it a little too much, or does it makes sense? I’d love to hear your thoughts. favicon

Skip DonorsChoose, donate to Iserotope directly

Posted on by Mark Isero

donors-choosefavicon The kind people over at DonorsChoose aren’t going to like this post very much.

Over the past seven years, DonorsChoose has helped me complete more than 30 projects, which has brought thousands of dollars — including hundreds of books — to my classroom.

So why am I telling people to bypass the site and donate to me directly?

Here are a couple reasons why:

1. DonorsChoose has very high administrative costs.
The site used to keep costs down, but now, things are getting out of hand. For example: I just completed a project for 11 books. (Thanks, Donors!) The cost of the books was $110. Sales tax made it $120. And then came the DonorsChoose fees: $30 for fulfillment and a $26.87 “optional” donation (which I don’t think is optional). The total cost: $179.13. That’s a lot more than the original $120.

2. DonorsChoose does not always have a wide selection.
The site partners with third-party companies. For books, for example, you have to buy through AKJ books, whose selection is fairly limited. Sure, you can request items from any company, but doing so requires more DonorsChoose points. There have been many times that I’ve wanted to purchase a book for a student but cannot because AKJ books does not have it in stock.

Please don’t get me wrong: DonorsChoose has been very helpful to me, and the site does have some advantages. For example, DonorsChoose does a great job connecting teachers with anonymous donors. Many strangers over the years have given to my students because of the popularity of DonorsChoose. In addition, the site knows how to encourage big businesses to donate to education. Some of my larger projects (like the document camera, for example) came from corporate contributions. Therefore, despite its high administrative costs, I am likely to keep my DonorsChoose page updated with potential projects.

Nevertheless, let me be clear: If you want to donate to The Kindle Classroom Project, your money will be more efficiently used if you donate it to me directly rather than going through DonorsChoose. And you’ll get a thank-you letter for tax purposes!

Convinced? Ready to donate? It’s quite easy! Here are two choices:

1. Go to the Kindle Classroom Project donation page and make a contribution!
You can donate $10 for one book, $36 for three months of The New York Times, $70 for one Kindle, or any other amount!

2. Go to the Iserotope Contribute page!
This page offers more ways to contribute. If you want complete control over which books to buy, for example, you can go to my students’ Amazon wishlist and purchase books directly for them.

* * *

I’m happy to report that the Kindle Classroom Project has expanded to a second classroom, this time in San Francisco. Eighteen ninth graders will check out their Kindles on April 1. The students will no doubt be happy with the 205 books they can find on their devices. But I’ve also told them that they should feel free to request books, too.

And that’s where you — and all the friends you tell — come in! Please consider buying an e-book (or two, or three) for the students. Remember, each e-book you buy can be shared on six Kindles, so it’s like getting six copies of the same book. Plus, an e-book lasts forever; it never gets lost or damaged or forgotten in someone’s locker.

Thank you for helping to build the Kindle Classroom Project and for caring about young people and their reading lives! If you have any questions or concerns, please leave me a comment. favicon