Reading Coraline online for free … and online full-text book clubs
Simultaneous with the release of the Coraline movie, HarperCollins is offering the full-text of Neil Gaiman’s middle grade novel online for free (for a limited time). School Library Journal reports that Walter Dean Myers’ new YA book, Dope Sick, will be available for free online at Adlit.org to coincide with its February 10 release. Stenhouse currently has a full-text PDF of Readicide: How Schools Are Killing Reading and What You Can Do About it, by Kelly Gallagher. Full-text books for children are available at LookyBook and the International Children’s Digital Library.
Strangely enough, some suburban school districts have “big money” assets like computers but not “little money” budgets for things like books. Or maybe your library books budget is stable but there haven’t been any new lit circle texts in a few years. Or maybe professional development funds have declined. Or maybe your school board has embraced a one-to-one laptop iniative. These online texts offer an interesting alternative to book clubs because many students/teachers can access the same text at the same time. Something to think about …
(Harnessing digital texts for bookish projects isn’t my original idea. My colleague Madhu Bhargava in India works in a laptop-intensive school, and her reading incentive program is based entirely on digital texts. She presented a paper on this topic at the 2008 IASL conference in Berkeley.)
Movie poster from teaser-trailer.com
February 8th, 2009 at 7:07 pm
I’m so green to blogging but I like this idea even though it seems so foreign to me. I love books–the smell, the feel, the mobility, and ownership. If I read it I usually have to buy it. I get them on loan at the public library but often buy it if I want to add it to my collection. Prior to reading “Reading Coraline online for free” I could not see who this would benefit or why someone would want to do such a thing…thanks for opening up my eyes. I had not considered that budget constraints would have such an affect on materials. I hope someone can further the discussion for me…