Amazon Kindle – Educational Uses

As mentioned in an earlier post, I’ve recently been given the opportunity to explore and work with the Amazon Kindle. The goal of the short term project is to identify possible use cases for the Kindle within the organization. I’m going to focus on the instructional, classroom uses we’ve brainstormed and/or identified through research via the web; by “we,” I’m referring to several conversations @sherrymn and I have had over the past couple of weeks. We are definitely interested in any thoughts or use cases with which you may be familiar.

Content Access. First of course, eBooks and, at some point, eTextbooks could obviously be delivered via the Kindle; hopefully, this would reduce learner costs over the long run, particularly after the price point on the Kindle comes down a little. Second, as we’ve explored the Kindle some, we’ve learned that registering multiple Kindles to a single account gives the account owner the ability to push content to each device. With an issued set of Kindles for a class, faculty could deliver content they’ve generated to learners for review as followup to a previous or preparation for an upcoming class. Third, an RSS feed could be set to deliver on a regular basis; faculty could deliver content tagged via a bookmarking or RSS reader tool. However, these two uses may only duplicate regular web access to the same content unless, as noted below, collaborative activities via the Kindle are used.

Collaborative Reading. The Kindle allows users to highlight and/or enter notes at any point in any text; the “clippings” and notes are stored online. The most interesting aspect of the note-taking function, however, is that if any notes taken are visible via all Kindles registered to the same account. With an issued set of Kindles for a class, all learners could engage the same text via collaborative note-taking and annotation exercises; while the interface would be somewhat clumsy for it, discussions could take place within the notes which are sync’ed wirelessly. These activities could be useful at a variety of reading levels: developmental readers to ESOL to honors seminars to graduate students.

Facilitated Reading. Specifically for ESOL or developmental readers, the Kindle could better enable facilitated, independent reading away from the classroom, particularly in absence of other available tools. Consider the Collaborative Reading idea noted above; the notes delivered to each Kindle could be faculty driven instead of learner generated; the purpose would be for faculty to provide additional annotations to support readers engaging a challenging text. Combining that feature with two built-in tools could be particularly useful. The Kindle has an integrated dictionary; you can browse the dictionary, or as you read, you can highlight a word and the defintion appears at the bottom of the screen. Further, the Kindle also has a native text-to-speech function which will read – in male or female voice – a text at variable speed, as controlled by the user.

There’s certainly a number of logistical issues to be addressed – cost, distribution, and theft prevention, among others; I hope to revisit some of those as time permits.