TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

The Sony Reader as a teacher’s pet—mine: How I use it in the classroom

By Joanna

TeleRead welcomes stories of other professionals using e-reading devices in special ways. E-mail Co-Editor Paul Biba. – D.R.

My Sony Reader is a teacher’s pet. Mine. I’m the teacher, and it’s a valuable classroom tool.

How? Well, I don’t just use my Reader for “reading” in the traditional sense. It’s also as a way to take long or important files with me for reading on the go.

My instruction manuals, recipes message board threads, magazine articles and anything text-based—I can easily save them all in HTML. Then I can import the files into Calibre and tag them to group into collections, which I can then load into my Sony.

Please note that the Sony isn’t the only reader useful for taking along professional materials and personal documents. You might be able to do the same thing with your Kindle, for example, or Cybook, iLiad or Be Book. If the material isn’t in digital form, perhaps you can scan and OCR it.

One recent use I have found for my Reader is managing my unit plans for teaching. I live in Canada and teach primary school French, and the program we use is music-and-drama based. I haven’t loaded any of the stories onto my Reader—I use paper ones, as the children do, so I can model it for them—but the Sony is already a helpful place to store my lessons.

A teaching guide

Each unit is based around a play, and it comes with all the material one needs for the children, as well as a massive spiral-bound teaching guide with step-by step teaching activities. The activities are sequential, meant to be done in order. They are very well-planned and include a lot of detail. Here is an example of a typical 1-2 page activity from the teaching guide:

Note: Scripted text is in French; translated to English here for illustration. Words in ALL CAPS are new vocabulary from the lesson’s word list

ACTIVITY 43: Targeted Gesture Teaching and ReviewMultiple intelligences: verbal-linguistic, interpersonal, kinesthetic, spatial
Language skills: speaking, listening

As you can see, there is a lot of superfluous information. It’s important to read the manual once through so that one understands the language skills being used, and the multiple intelligences at play in the program. But when teaching subsequently, it’s self-explanatory. It’s obvious that the children will be speaking and listening. It’s obvious that if you tell the children, “This is a DVD,” you should then show it to them. It’s obvious that if a student gives you the correct answer, you should praise them. And it’s obvious too why each manual is about 400 pages!

Hassle to drag in the actual paper books

That said, I’ve found in the past that I have been hampered by being too lazy to bring the book with me. Sometimes, I plan to do one activity, and actually get through it faster than I thought. If I rely on post-it note cheat sheets, I may not have information about the next activity ready and available when and where I want it.

But carrying the books around with me is not an option either. Most French teachers, myself included, don’t have dedicated classrooms. I share a resource cupboard in another classroom with the gym teacher and carry around my things in a tote while I travel around from class to class.

My typical load: a calendar for the entry routine, a folder with my schedule and memos, puppets for the JK/SK classes, a ball to use for filler games, oversize ‘big books’ for reading the play with the kids, any photocopies I need of work for the children to complete with me, a netbook with all my MP3s and Power Points on music days—the list goes on and on.

I have two grade levels doing this program, so that’s two unit guides, with all their accoutrements, and about half of it duplicated content anyway—the first hundred-odd pages are all about the philosophy of the program, charts showing how it meets the provincial curriculum requirements etc. and are the same in every unit guide. And as we have seen, the actual lesson parts are not brief.

Organizing challenges

Thankfully, the unit guides have an appendix with all the word lists in order. For awhile, I was working off of a photocopy of these, accompanied by a checklist of rough lesson descriptions. Every time I did a lesson with the kids, I would refer to the checklist for a hint of what we were meant to be doing, then flip back to the word list and keep that out while I was teaching.

It wasn’t the best system because I didn’t have the space on the word list page for any notes or reminders, so I’d often find myself rooting in my bag during a lesson for a page I didn’t have out with me. And two of my three older classes are doing the same play, so I had double the paper cluttering up my bag, which made it harder to find things, and harder to ensure that when I did find it, I had the one for the group I was with.

The complete book

What I really needed was to have the bulky teacher book in front of me, only less bulky and with all the superfluous information edited out. A summary of the activity, the words needed for it, and a brief line or two of any mnemonic notes would suffice. I needed more than random sticky notes, but less than a 400-page teaching manual.

I finally had the brainstorm to put it all on my Reader. I had about 100 lessons per unit to go through.

For each, I wrote a brief description and then plugged in the word list. It was about a 2-3 hour investment for each play, but it was worth it because now I am set for the year. Instead of having a bulky teacher’s guide in front of me, I have my reader. It’s small and convenient. I can easily turn the page when we’re finished and have the next activity ready to go at any time.

Used to Ms. Gizmo

The kids are so used to seeing me with gadgets that they hardly notice the Reader. When I start my lesson, I can just open up their file, and there I am, just where I left off the last time. The Sony remembers my place. Best of all, being a computer file, it’s easy to copy.

My two Grade 1 classes do the same play, but because they only have French four days a week, and sometimes not on the same days, they aren’t always at the same point in the unit work. I can have two copies of my little guidebook, one for each of them, and pick up my lesson exactly where I need to for each different group.

Here is the above two-page lesson, in its entirely, following the edits I did:

ACTIVITY 43: Gesture Teaching/ReviewWord list:
taille
casse
problème
par accident
désolé
apporte

E-book version not full replacement for teaching guide

I am not saying my ebook version can replace a well-written teaching guide completely, of course. As a teacher, I need to know my stuff, and the philosophy, teaching tips, curriculum guidelines and other details are important. But they are not so important that I need to carry around 2-3 versions of them in my poor, over-loaded tote and have them in front of me for the moment I am teaching. I can keep those on the cupboard for review during planning, and use my little ebook version for the quick and dirty ‘teach this now’ part of my day.

I love having the word list and lesson description in front of me in the same place. I love that if we finish something early, the next activity is always ready to go. I love that I can keep separate versions of the teaching guide for each class, and let the Reader remember for me where I left off with each of them. And I love that I can keep my entire school-wide curriculum in my hands at any moment, at home, when planning, and in front of my eyes when I teach. I can’t believe I didn’t think to put this all on my Reader sooner!