Thursday, August 9, 2007

Week 9, Task 22: I Hear With My Little Ear...

I was so disappointed to find that the World eBook Fair's free downloads ended less than one week ago, on August 4. It only goes to reinforce that oft-quoted maxim: the early bird catches the worm... I'll just have to try again next summer. I then disapparated on over to Librivox for a survey of their offerings. It's an interesting proposition: all volunteer readers, all public domain books. Very democratic. Their FAQs are addressed on a wiki, which is in keeping with the 'open to all' philosophy. This is a good example of Web 2.0 in action and their model could possibly be tried in a school setting. The old "each one teach one" slogan comes to mind. Classes could 'adopt' books as projects. Kids would enjoy recording 'their' chapters and listening to the completed books. This could be good collaboration between classroom teachers, library staff and computer staff (not that we have any at our school, but I'm sure someone out there does!).

I would like to add some information that this "thing" didn't include, and that is the value of sites like audible.com. Audible.com is an audio book subscription service. They have a good selection and excellent narrators. You can download your selections and store them on your computer, transfer them to an MP3 player or burn them onto CDs. I have been searching for a similar service that could provide a site license and school-appropriate selections (audible used to but alas, no longer). So far I have only found one service - overdrive.com - and their cost is prohibitive (they want to deal with county-wide systems, not individual sites). Any suggestions from the team or my fellow bloggers?

1 comment:

Jackie S, 2.0 project manager said...

We'll check out Audible.com and can add it as a Discovery Resource on School Library Learning 2.0 THANKS.