Supplemental Digital Instructional Media Sources
Discover digital instructional media resources you can share with students and parents. In today's session, we'll explore amazing audiobooks and content are available online for educational use. Need nonfiction content? Several online providers of nonfiction have made content available for K-12 education.
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Topics
Digital Audiobooks for Free
The Research
Valuing research insights, Listenwise includes its own collection of research. You will find research, white papers, and case studies on listening in the classroom.
For example, consider these quick summations:
Listening comprehension is a fundamental building block to reading comprehension development. Now there is new research evidence concerning a growing number of children who fail to develop adequate reading comprehension skills primarily due to poor listening comprehension.
Ever notice that good stories get better student engagement? This research highlights the power of a meaningful story to specifically impact listening behavior.
Why would we want to do this and how does listening affect learning? Our white paper highlights some of the key research in this area as we consider the value of listening skills for our children.
Many English learners are not acquiring the level of academic language needed for college and career readiness. Are we underestimating the impact that ongoing work with oral academic language can have?
The Problem
Do you know of one challenging aspect of bringing audio content to children? As librarians and teachers, we can’t record our own using copyrighted materials.
Where can we find amazing audio content for our students and children?
Solutions Abound
There are many solutions available to us now during this time that are not often. Let's take a quick look at them.
Strategy Alert
This strategy focuses on students outlining content and taking notes. Also, drawing concept maps and creating mental images.
What approach are you using with students when they listen or watch videos online?
Solution #1: Non-Fiction Audio Source - ListenWise
Listenwise is a web-based resource for three to six minute podcast lessons from non-fiction storytellers that include listening comprehension quizzes for your classroom. Once you join, you can get into their library of non-fiction podcasts which are organized in various ways.
In the Teacher Dashboard, you can search the content. Current events are featured, including COVID-19 news and feature stories.
Listenwise Premium makes age-appropriate, non-fiction podcasts in several subjects available. You can listen to ELA, social studies, and science podcasts at a cost. When you first sign up as a teacher, you get a thirty-day free trial of Listenwise Premium which gives you access to a full podcast library and interactive transcripts. You also get listening comprehension quizzes and more. How much more? You get access to upcoming Lexile audio measures for content.
Strategy Alert
These images show Vocabulary Programs (d=0.63). It is a Surface Learning focused strategy.
This strategy focuses on students identifying and redefining terms they don't know in their own words. You can use tables or concept sorts (second image shown left). Tools like Draw.io/Diagrams.net, Circly and others.
What approach are you using with students to track and learn unfamiliar words?
Solution #2 - Audible Stories
We know listening to stories has the same benefit as reading with one’s eyes. Audible Stories is now offering, at no charge, a collection of audio stories.
Stories are organized into a variety of categories, such as the following:
Littlest Learners
Elementary
Tween
Teen
Literary Classics
Folk & Fair Tales for All
Their stories are also available in various languages, including French, German, Spanish, Italian and more.
No login is required.
Solution #3 - StoryNory
Storynory offers a variety of stories and tales in video format. It is also available as an iOS or Android app that you can get on your device.
Solution #4 - Free Stories from David Walliams
"All those stuck at home with their kids may be able to relate to ‘The World’s Worst Children’!" as David Walliams revealed that he'd be sharing his stories with the nation.
"I’ll be releasing an audio story every day for the next 30 days absolutely free," he said. "First up is The Terrible Triplets!" (Source: Good Housekeeping)
Stories Available Now
Solution #5 - Loyal Books Free Audiobooks
You can get audio versions of many books in the public domain (such as these Lit2Go) at LoyalBooks. These are older titles you may find of interest.
Love You Forever by Robert Munch
Solution #6 - Make Your Own
Ever wish you could turn student-created ePub files into narrated audio books? Or make any ePub into an audio book? You can on your Windows 10 computer, by taking advantage of the Freda ebook’s built-in audio reader.
Before we go through the process, let’s take a moment to revisit how you can create an ePub-formatted ebook for free.
NonFiction Media for Remote Learners
Source #1: Netflix Documentaries
In an April, 2020, announcement, Netflix says you can now screen documenaries. While intended for classroom viewing, they have made a new option available.
You can find a complete list online. Here are three that caught my eye:
Babies: A series that explores the first full year of life.
Chasing Coral: Follows marine biologists as they invent the first time-lapse camera. The purpose is to record bleaching events in real time.
Our Planet:Explores the natural world. It comes from the creators of the award-winning series Planet Earth.
Source #2: Open Culture
Need access to over two-hundred and fifty documentaries? Look no further than Open Culture’s collection.
They have a rich list of content you will need to review as an educator.
Conversations with Myself – Free – Alan Watts walks in the mountains. Talks about the limitations of technology and the problem of trying to keep track of an infinite universe. (1971)
Creative Process: Norman McLaren – Free – Explores Norman McLaren’s process of artistic creation. (1990)
Future Shock – Free – A short documentary based on a book written by futurist Alvin Toffler in 1970. It’s narrated by Orson Welles. (1972)
Source #3: Top Documentary Films
A mind-boggling collection of documentary films are available online. Top Documentary Films offers a searchable index of websites.
My quick picks:
The Great Leap Forward: Addresses questions relevant to artificial intelligence.
Space Shuttle: The Human Time Bomb: This film presents a probing investigation. It seeks to “identify the true culprits behind the disaster.”
Coronavirus: A Global Emergency: From ABC News’, this documentary series tries to explain the COVID-19 crisis.
Source #4: Reading Vine (NonFiction & Fiction)
Reading Vine offers free resources to help improve reading and comprehension skills that include fiction, nonfiction, poetry, essays, and stories. What’s more, questions and answers, worksheets, and activities are also available. A wide variety of educators and parents use Reading Vine to provide personalized reading experiences
Each text comes with an easy to create PDF and reading comprehension questions. An answer key is also included. Add collections of content, or reading sets, to your “My Library.”
To get started with Reading Vine, you can set up an account with either Google or Office 365. Or you can use an email address and come up with a password. Once you have your account or profile set up, you can explore a variety of reading sets.
Once your account setup and reading sets are ready to go, you can create a PDF with favorite passages. These PDFs come with activities as well. This makes them easy to share with students via your learning management system. Selections come with questions. These are simple questions and can be used as a starting point.
What Good Readers Do & Strategies That Work
What Good Readers Do
Here is a list of eight actions (source) that good readers take during reading. How many items can you check off? And, here are a few strategies to look at:
Repeated Reading Programs (d=0.75) (S)
Can read words in an accurate and quick manner
Vocabulary Programs (d=0.63) (S)
Can connect the meaning of words and sentences
Note-Taking (d=0.51), Concept Mapping (d=0.64) (D)
Outline text and take notes, draw concept maps, create mental images
Reciprocal Teaching (d=0.74) (D)
Rely on clarifying prior knowledge to make sense of words they don’t understand
Make predictions about what’s going to happen or appear next in text
Practice summarization strategies that focus on the relevant, discard the irrelevant
Keep tabs on their own comprehension (or lack thereof) then do something about
Metacognition Strategies (d=0.58) (D)
Engage in metacognitive reflection about what they have read and how well they did
But, wait, there's even more!
Do you wish your students had a central place to explore historic documents, objects, and more for their research?
...can help
24-hour, Portable Library for Students
This is a tool for independent research, and for enhancing activities or instruction. Teachers can:
Comb the archive for images, videos, and more to fill slides,
Create reading selections and worksheets,
Discover images and text for document-based questions/learning,
Add a little pizazz to classroom presentations and work
Available in seven languages: Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish. You can change languages at the top of every page.
The WDL makes it possible to discover, study, and enjoy cultural treasures and significant historical documents on one site, in a variety of ways. Content on the WDL includes books, manuscripts, maps, newspapers, journals, prints and photographs, sound recordings, and films.
“World Digital Library.” Librarianship Studies & Information Technology. April 19, 2020
Free Books Online
Most free books are in the public domain, but that doesn’t mean that they are not relevant for our students. But that’s not the only place to find free books. Some parents and students may benefit from signing up for a free month with a particular service even if they don’t plan to extend their usage beyond the complimentary time.
Children’s Storybooks Online – This site offers web-based books for young children, older children, and young adult readers. A few have audio provided as well.
SYNC – Sync is a free summer audio book program for teens 13 and up. It begins on April 27, 2017, and goes through the summer. Each week, two complete audio book downloads are made available.
Open eBooks – Students from low-income families can benefit from these free ebooks, but the school needs to sign up first. Then educators from that school can request access codes to share with students. Each student can check out up to 10 ebooks at a time. The Open eBooks app works on iOS and Android devices.
Library of Congress Archive – With more than 150,000 books online, you will definitely want to use the search features to narrow down by topic, collection, creator (author), and/or language.
Reading Resource Project – This program that runs throughout the year provides free books (only shipping is required). Many of the sets include 100 books that can be shipped to you for $88.
Free Kids Books – Choose to read the books either online or download as a PDF to read offline.
Kindle’s Top 100 Free Books – Download and read via the Kindle app or online. Lots of selection choices.
Barnes & Noble’s Popular Free eBooks – Access Barnes & Noble’s list of ebooks that you can download and read on the NOOK app. Be sure to use the sidebar options to narrow search results by subject and age of reader.
TCEA Online Courses For You
