Books Archives - Page 5 of 14

Published May 31, 2012

26 University Presses Now Partner with Bookshare

A lot has happened over the year with university press partnerships. With three new partnerships in the last few weeks, I realized it was time to post an update. These three new university presses signing agreements to contribute digital files with world rights to Bookshare bring the total number of university press partners to twenty-six. The new partners are: Edinburgh University Press. As the imprimatur of one of Britain’s oldest and most distinguished centers of learning, they publish books of the highest academic standards. Their main subject areas are American Studies, Classics & Ancient History, Film & Media Studies, History,…

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Published May 25, 2012

PAR: a Process for Selecting Accommodations for Reading

A guest post from Ben Johnston, Director of Marketing for Don Johnston, Incorporated. This resource sounds great! Thanks for sharing it with us. With over 140,000 accessible books, Bookshare is a blessing for students with disabilities. This resource would have been unimaginable just ten years ago when days were spent scanning books. But with more accessible books than ever, how do you choose a reading accommodation best suited to a student’s needs? Two assistive technology leaders, Denise DeCoste, Ed.D., and Linda Bastiani Wilson, MA, Ed., from Montgomery County Schools in Maryland found the whole process of choosing reading accommodations to…

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Published May 22, 2012

Congratulations to Sallie Spencer, Top Bookshare Mentor Teacher!

The 2012 Mentor Teacher selected to win the top prize, an iPad, is Sallie Spencer! Sallie is a middle school Special Education Teacher at Olivet Middle School, in Olivet, Michigan. As a Mentor Teacher, she met with district special education staff both in groups and individually, and walked them step-by-step through the process of finding and downloading Bookshare books for their students. She also worked one-to-one with general education staff with Bookshare-qualified students in their classes. Sally believes that Bookshare “is not used enough so I truly want to put the word out!” Sallie adds that she regularly promotes Read2Go…

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Published May 18, 2012

Individual Memberships for Change and Transition

Mary Carney, a 7th grade English teacher at Lowville Academy Central Middle School, NY, wanted to change the way some of her students thought about reading, and the way they read. She knew that if she could find a way to help her students feel more confident and independent as readers, they would be more successful in her English class. Carney signed her qualified students up for Bookshare organizational memberships. “I believed the federally funded library (free to U.S. students who qualify) could support my efforts to turn around students who were falling behind their grade level reading.” One of…

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Published April 20, 2012

Words of Wisdom on Transition from a College Freshman

How does a very talented, bright, highly motivated young woman with severe dyslexia succeed in college? How is she getting almost a 4.0 GPA, top grades in all her classes, without her mom sitting beside her, patiently reading every word in every book as she did for twelve years? All incoming freshman experience some college jitters, but this driven young woman, Elizabeth, was justifiably concerned about succeeding in classes with hundreds of others students who didn’t have dyslexia. Her story about her transition should inspire many high school seniors in similar situations: “When I applied to college, I asked for…

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Published March 27, 2012

Volunteer for Exciting New Image Description Project!

A cutting-edge image description project is underway at Bookshare. Funded by the Leveraging Impact through Technology (LIT) award from the U.S. Department of Education, Office of Special Education Programs, this pilot project uses Poet, an open-source, crowd-sourcing image description tool developed by the DIAGRAM Center, another OSEP-funded project operated by Benetech and its partners. This innovative pilot project needs volunteers. Poet makes it easy to create accessible image descriptions and add them to DAISY books. Volunteer describers log into a website, select the book they are working on, see its images, and enter descriptions for the images in the appropriate…

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Published March 15, 2012

A Teen with Dyslexia Describes Benefits of Reading with Technology

A guest post by Brian Meersma, a student member of the Bookshare Advisory Board I am a high school sophomore with dyslexia. I was diagnosed at a young age, but was always eager to learn new things. Because I had trouble reading, my parents and grandparents would read to me for hours. I loved listening to all the great books they read to me and I knew there was no way I was able to read those books on my own. What I realized was that I had great listening skills. I got so much more out of books when…

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Published February 9, 2012

The Early Days of Bookshare

Eagerness, excitement, dedication, and pride characterized the early days of Bookshare. Many of the early Bookshare Members with disabilities were also volunteers who dedicated long hours to scanning and proofreading books, prior to submitting the books to Bookshare. These volunteers literally opened a book and pressed the pages one-by-one, onto a flatbed scanner, hoping the scanner would accurately recognize the text on the page. We’ve gathered some stories from early Members and volunteers to remind ourselves what Bookshare was like and how good it was! Members are welcome to contribute more to this retrospective through Comments in this blog. “It…

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Published January 12, 2012

Hot Books for Emerging Teen Readers

We are often asked about high-interest books for emerging readers in middle and upper grades. To make this category of books easy to find in Bookshare, we’ve organized the titles in a new Special Collection called “Hot Books for Emerging Teen Readers.” To start, there are 327 books in the collection. You can find the collection by clicking on Browse (in the tool bar at the top, near the right) and then clicking on Special Collections and clicking on “Hot Books for Emerging Teen Readers.” There are lots of titles by Michele Martin Bossley, Becky Citra, Norah Mcclintock, Eric Walters…

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Published January 6, 2012

Read2Go Inducted into AppleVis Hall of Fame

Last month, Read2Go was selected as a potential inductee into the AppleVis iOS App Hall of Fame, and this month, we are pleased to announce that Read2Go was chosen as one of the eight inaugural inductees. This Hall of Fame, to quote from the AppleVis website, showcases “the passion and hard work that app developers put into creating great apps that are fully accessible to VoiceOver users. These apps place powerful tools into the palms of our hands, and give access to services, information, media or entertainment that the sighted world takes for granted.” We share this honor and want…

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Category: Books