Thursday, August 28, 2008

Kindles in the Classroom

A tip of the hat to my former colleague Steve Pool for this one. Steve, btw, is Director of Content Management and Production at VitalSource Technologies, An Ingram company.

Steve recently sent me an e-mail to tell me a quick story about his son, a freshman at a local high school, and the Kindle. His son explained how "his World History teacher at Fishers High School, Chris Edwards, told the class to put away the textbooks for the day. He was tired of teaching from the book. Then he surprised the class by unveiling five Kindles the school had purchased. He was told that his is the first school to order and use them in the classroom. They read an article about India from the National Geographic. But it wasn't India he was talking about when he got home. It was the Kindle."

Steve went on to say that, "my son knows I have been working in digital publishing for years and I keep telling him 'print is dead' but he has resisted the notion of reading text from a screen. This coming from a so called digital native. But today when I asked him how was the experience he had to admit, 'it was pretty cool'. And then, 'where can we buy one?'"

Very cool! I'm curious to hear more about this and so I've got an e-mail message in to Mr. Edwards to see if he'd be willing to do a quick blog interview. I hope to be back soon with the interview...

1 comments:

Anonymous said...

We purchased a Kindle for our 15-year-old daughter so she could do her summer reading for school on it. She read The Life of Pi, The Kite Runner, and a bunch of other books, including Eat, Pray, Love, and three downloads that I gave her for her birthday. Yes, her birthday present from her dad was three books, which, had they been selected by me and handed to her in physical form, would still be sitting somewhere right now unread. Instead, she downloaded three books in a series that interests her and she has read them all.

Bottom line: I read more on my Kindle, and so does my high-schooler.