Did you know that it takes the average person about 30 minutes or more to realize they lost their wallet, but less than 3 minutes to realize they lost their phone? Imagine if we applied this same principle to students and novels they read for literature class. From my personal experience as an English teacher, they realize they lost/forgot/the dog ate their book about 3 seconds before class starts and find out they have an open book quiz. How many of your students would not know where their phone/iPod is at any given moment? Sure they are supposed to be locked safely away in their lockers, but you know they have it in their pocket or purse.

Why not harness the power of this in your classroom?

Try this – next time you assign a classic work of literature have this on your board at the start of class:

You most likely will not even need to instruct you students, they will pull out their phones and instinctively scan it with their QR code reader app and boom – you just got them to instantly access a classic work on their phone. Sneaky, yes, but now you have their attention – and it will be a lot harder for them to lose the book.

This particular code takes you to Hamlet, but Project Gutenberg has thousands of others if you don’t like that one.

Here’s another idea, during national poetry month, get QR codes from Project Gutenberg for great works of poetry, print them out, and post them around the school. Don’t put any explanation, just print out the code and post it. Or, if you are feeling really adventurous make your own codes and link to site of modern poets such as Maya Angelou or Shel Silverstein. You can use the Google URL shortener http://goo.gl/ to create your QR Code.  Visit my Diigo page for more http://groups.diigo.com/group/lost-in-it, or add your own.

Happy reading!

…besides the fact that they break common spelling and capitalization rules? College students.

iTunes U was (and still is) a wealth of educational podcasts produced by some of the top colleges and universities around the world. For years K-12 has been asking for it’s own part of the iTunes U playground, but it was only until recently that we were allowed in. That didn’t stop innovative K-12 folks from creating and sharing great work, but we had to do it on our own.

I have found the same to be true in the eBook arena. When I started my research 3 years ago, I had several vendors claim that they could eliminate the backpacks at my school. They would work with the publishers to get all of our physical textbooks in a digital format, all I had to do was turn over my book list. Easy right? I wish.

Each and every one would eventually come back and only offer books for our AP courses, which of course used college level textbooks. The other books, they could not obtain the rights to the digital copy from the publisher. It wasn’t that the digital version did not exist; it was that the publishers would not release them to the 3rd party reseller.

Why? Simple economics. Just like with iTunes U.

Every college student on the planet has to purchase their textbooks for every class, every semester. These textbooks (particularly in the sciences) are constantly updating. How many of you remember spending over $100 on a Biology book only to find out you got a lousy buy-back price because a new edition was being released next year? The text book industry is huge and they make a lot of money every semester from college students. They are a prime market for digital versions of textbooks. Because they are such a huge market, you can find college edition digital books in a variety of formats: Kindle, Nook, and any variety of online web based applications.

On the other end of the spectrum you have the K-12 market. Still living in the dark ages of the textbook adoption cycle where new books are adopted (doesn’t that sound all warm and fuzzy) every 6-8 years. Yes folks, 6-8 years! I remember my first year of teaching the Social Studies textbook was the same one I used when I was in middle school.  My favorite line was, that according to the authors, we many never see the Berlin Wall fall down in our life time. Now I’ve been teaching for a few years, but I’m not that old.

Since K-12 schools “adopt” new books every 6-8 years, what is the rush for producing digital content at the same rate as higher ed? This was my constant road block in this process, letting publishers know that K-12 was not satisfied with this snail pace production schedule.

Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank, and of having nothing to do. Once or twice she had peeped into the book her sister was reading, but it had no pictures or conversations in it, “and what is the use of a book,” thought Alice, “without pictures or conversations?”

These are the introductory words to Alice in Wonderland, and I can’t think of a better way to start my eBook story. It all started off with a conversation around the question of “what’s next?” It happened just over 2 years ago at the Blue Ribbon Schools of Excellence Conference with a group of innovative educational leaders. I had just shared with them about my school’s iPod program, and the question was posed as to where we should go next. The issue was that iPods were transforming from MP3 and video players into  mini touch screen computers. Kindles and other eReaders were entering the market at the same price point, and there was the dawn of the netbook computer. All these affordable tools brought about an interesting idea. If they could publish your favorite New York Times best seller as a eBook, why not a textbook?

We began to look at the possibilities – no backpacks, students just walking around with an eReader or laptop. If there were web enabled eBooks, they could be truly interactive including Alice’s wish of both pictures and conversation – in real time on the web.

In the digital age doesn’t everything start off as a digtial copy anyway? This should be easy! Then I fell down the rabbit hole.