E-Reading in 5th Grade: Getting Started with Kindles

Now that our students have been using their Kindles for nearly a month, I think it is a great time to reflect on the benefits and new-found struggles of "e-reading". 

The students were very excited when we received the Kindles. They literally could not wait to get their hands on the new technology. However, a lot of our students had unexpected reactions to the devices. For instance, some really struggled with the touch screen technology; a challenge I would not have expected given the tech experience most of our kids seem to have these days. The Kindles rely on a much more "intuitive" touch screen approach, which means that there is not a button for turning pages, accessing the menu, or returning to the home screen. Instead, you have to remember which part of the screen to touch to access those functions. The ten students that had been assigned the older model Kindles, without the touch screens, had a much easier time navigating the tools.

After about an hour becoming accustomed to the new technology, the students were ready to start shopping. We allowed the kids to choose one book of their choice from the Amazon store. I encouraged them to use the rating and recommendation tools from Amazon, and we also had the old fashioned Scholastic book orders to help them out. I was impressed with our students' abilities to choose high-quality and interesting titles. The kids also learned about samples, and had a great time downloading a few pages of books that caught their interests. 

That night I was able to easily purchase the titles, after a quick support email to Whispercast. Luckily our school has set aside quite a bit of funds to help enrich our classroom libraries. Because this money is available, purchasing new titles has been fairly easy. I also learned that each purchase has to be made separately, and loaded onto the specific device. Amazon has amazing customer support and has been crucial in helping us learn to manage the Kindles. 

I would love to include a picture of our students reading on the devices, but I keep forgetting! I PROMISE that the next post will feature our kids enjoying their reading. We will also share some of the ways we are using the Kindles to help with instruction.