Bellomo Ebooks Resource Page
Latest update to this document: 17 April 2003
Ebooks In Education
The use of
e-books in education is very exciting to me.
As teachers, these allow schools, even on low budgets, to have access to
full text books. Now reasonably, if
schools can’t afford books, they probably won’t have computers, but that’s not
to say that a teacher can’t print off verses 1-25 of Shakespeare’s “Julius
Caesar”. Not only can the teacher do
this, but they can do this on a lunch right after he/she realized it’s
relevance to they’re pre-lunch discussion about the Roman Empire. E-books satisfy us as all Internet resources
do; they’re at our fingertips immediately.
We can have them as quickly as we say we want them just about.
Additionally,
with the growth of the Internet, more and more students have access at home and
if not there then they have access at public locations from their school to the
libraries around them. This allows
students to find literature that they may not have before. They can sample it quickly and decide if they
want it. Also, this allows students like
us with laptops to have stored electronic books on us at all times.
E-books offer all
the benefits of printed literature but with the addition of speed and
expense. These are two attributes that
are always lacking in education.
Ebook Links
This site offers hundreds of ebooks ready to download. I found it easy to browse titles. The selection
is broken into eight categories. From those, all titles were listed with "download now" button linked making
it very easy to find.
What a
neat ebook site. This site is designed with children in mind. These are full text stories with color
and illustrations. This is a nice site for parents to use with their children as well as teachers and
tutors to use with their students.
Bookrags is a cool site. It
displays hundreds of titles but separates them alphabetically. You click on the letter, it lists titles.
This is a very handy site for searching titles for all ages.
"Here you can read whole books free of charge. Click on the book of your choice
to start reading. To flip through the book, use the navigation bar at the bottom
of each page to flip back and forward, or go to the book's contents to jump to a
specific page or chapter. You can always return to this page by clicking on the
eBooks Cube logo at the top." This site also allows an all-ages
selection listed alphabetically. This is another very useful site.
Free Ebooks specializes in
fiction, tutorials, marketing, and business books. Titles are listed by category. This is more of a resource
site with less emphasis on all-ages but is still a nice resource.
This site, like many of the others,
has a huge selection of books for all ages. With some 35 categories they range from business and computers
to children and classic literature.
This site offers a lot but is best
when searching with a title or author in mind. You can also search by publisher and subject. This is
handy when trying to find a particular resource but less so when just looking to browse. With more
experience this site would be extremely useful but is less friendly to beginner or first-time user.
This site is nice in
that they'll list everything they have to offer either by authors or by titles. This makes it very
easy to quickly find out if they have what you want. If you don't have a certain something you're looking
for, this also makes it nice to browse maybe searching according to other books you've read by an author.
Project Gutenberg has almost 6,300
full-text titles ready to download. This range in reading level and in subject matter and genre. This is
also a site that requires an author or title word. Since they can't publish any texts still in copyright,
most of their titles are pre-1923. This is very good in searching for classic literature at all levels.
This site, also put out by
Barnes and Noble, is fairly restricted in selection. It is nice though offering many of the big name
classics that students have to read mostly in high school. With nothing really targetted at children, this
site is a very useful resource for high school level and up. Perhaps some middle school level children
could use this as well but fewer than not.
The Oxford Text Archive
was designed as a resource and research search site. Many documents and other resources, some 2500, are offered
in over 25 languages. They are still building this library. This would be very useful for students fifth
grade and up in doing any type of research primarily in history and literature research.
School Links
Link to Northern Michigan University
R.Bellomo: rbellomo@nmu.edu