Week 9: Thing 22 - Digital Books

No doubt about it that both ebooks and audio books offer a nice diversity for many students. Our special support teachers love having the option of audio books for the required English books for their students. I am also starting to build a collection of ebooks in our library, thereby providing students with reference material which they can easily search through. Another wonderful benefit to these ebooks is that an unlimited number of students can view them at one time, and they can access them anywhere that has an Internet connection.

It was nice to see that there are so many free, online accesses to digital books. Though I had explored some of the resources in the past, there were others I did not know about, such as the International Music Score Library Project. What a great resource for our music teachers - I will be sure to share it with them. I did have a bit of trouble navigating through some of the sites. I had to download Adobe Shockwave on my Mac in order to run the British Library Online Gallery, and once I did the site was very slow to download and crashed two times before I gave up. Perhaps it would run better on a PC, but I'm wondering about the complications we may have at school. Often our school computers have issues with multimedia websites.

Regardless of issues, I bookmarked all these sites and plan to add a Digital Book Pathfinder on my website. I think students and teacher alike will appreciate knowing about these great, free resources.