Featured: 10-30-2013 eHighlighter

eHighlighter for iOS can be your personal research assistant bringing eBook benefits to paper sources using your device's camera.

Using eHighlighter you can prepare organized, searchable, copy-and-pastable excerpts and notes from hardcopy books, journals, and magazines. Easily access these notes on your iOS device or any other web-enabled device.

Other eHighlighter featres:

• Create, manage, and export MLA, Chicago, or APA styled bibliographies. Instantly add citation information by scanning a book's barcode or searching by title/author.
• Keep information organized with notes and tags. Sort and search highlights by tag or keyword.
• Instantly share notes with other eHighLighter users or export to email, Evernote, and Dropbox.

eHighLighter is $1.99 (US) on the iTunes store. It requires iOS 7.0 or later and is compatible with iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch.

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Featured: 9-12-2013 Net Texts

Net Texts helps schools replace or supplement traditional textbooks with customized multimedia courses delivered to students' iPads, Android tablets, and laptops.

Teachers can use NetTexts' Content Management Website to select existing courses or to create new ones by mixing and matching items from the NetTexts library with their own educational material. Courses can include videos, slideshows, e-books, PDFs, text, audiobooks, and Web links.

Students then use the NetTexts iPad, Android, or web app to download and view these courses. Students will feel more engaged and have more ownership of their learning, whether reading the latest assigned e-book or watching a 'flipped classroom' video.

Net Texts consulting services help your school get the most out of Net Texts. Teachers will be trained how to use the content management site and mobile apps, how to find Open Educational Resources, and how to create high quality content.

Net Texts can build customized OER courses based on teachers' recommendations, syllabi, and state standards. A school or district can replace textbooks with a multimedia curriculum based on OER, saving money on textbooks for years to come, as Net Texts courses can be updated with new material at any time.

 Watch Introducing Net Texts: The Digital Backpack for Your iPad

Net Texts courses contain teacher-created material as well as Creative Commons-licensed and other open education resources from the Web.

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Featured: 11/28/2012 Calameo [Self-publishing]

Calaméo instantly creates interactive web publications from your PDF files.

Publish, search for, and share all your documents online with Calaméo. Organize your publications into subscriptions. Your colleagues and students can add comments to and start discussions on each publication.

The Calaméo publishing method offers a wide variety of options and is simple to use. From a PDF file, create an interactive electronic document that is accessible from a computer and can simulate the feeling of reading a paper document: page turning, mark the pages, zoom in. Your documents can have as many pages as you like.

Watch Creating Online Publications with Calameo

A basic Calaméo account is free. Upgrading to a Premium account allows access to more features.

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COD - 8/23/2012 - Kno [ebooks]

Kno is a reader for digital textbooks. With over 60 features to facilitate reading, studying, note taking, and organization, Kno can do everything a physical textbook can do and much more.

Kno is easy to use. Simply get your college or K-12 textbooks from Kno.com and read them using the Kno iPad app, Kno.com website, or the Kno for Facebook app. Apps for Android and Windows are expected soon.

Features currently available in all Kno platforms:

• Flashcards instantly converts terms from your textbook into flash cards.
• Search for any words in your textbook or PDF.
• Highlight any text on a page.
• Create stickies for a highlight or any page.
• Course Manager organizes all your textbooks, PDFs, and content in one spot.

Additional features available in the free iPad app:

• Zoom in on any picture by double-tapping.
• Smart Links maps instructional videos, images, and photos to formulas and concepts in your book.
• Preview any page from an entire book.
• Journal lets you create a digital notebook by clipping images and text from your textbook.
• Pen lets you write directly on the pages of your textbook or PDF and in Journal.
• Quiz Me turns any diagram in a book into a multiple choice quiz.
• Kno 3D brings chemistry figures to life in select titles.
• Share with classmates right from within your book.
• Dropbox allows you to easily import PDF class materials by dragging and dropping right into Course Manager.

Visit the KnoYouTube channel

You can organize all of your textbooks and class materials using the KnoCourse Manager. Adding a new class only takes a few seconds.

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COD - 6/13/2012 - ClassroomWindow [Sharing]

ClassroomWindow is based on a simple premise: teachers are the real experts and no one knows better than they do what works – or doesn’t work – in the classroom.

ClassroomWindow is a place where teachers' voices can be heard by publishers, product developers, and district decision makers. Teachers may share their expert opinions about the books, curricula, and tools they use daily.

ClassroomWindow taps the practical experience of potentially millions of educators working with classroom products on a daily basis, combining the breadth of crowd-sourcing with the depth of expert analysis and evaluation, finally allowing purchase decisions to be made based only on the effectiveness of educational products and services.

ClassroomWindow hopes the transparency created via their site will heighten competition among education vendors, leading to more effective products that better meet the needs of today’s classroom.

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COD - 5/7/2012 - Wolfram Education Portal [Math]

Wolfram is well known as the maker of Mathematica, Wolfram|Alpha, and the Wolfram Demonstrations Project, some of the most dynamic math teaching and learning tools available. The Wolfram Education Portal opens the door to the best of all of their technologies in one place.

In the Wolfram Education Portal you'll find a dynamic textbook, lesson plans, widgets, interactive Demonstrations, and more. 

The dynamic text includes Wolfram|Alpha widgets, Wolfram|Alpha links, and interactive Demonstrations created in Mathematica.

Lesson plans are made to help teachers guide a class through the lesson or for independent work. Interactive tools, created with Mathematica, help students understand concepts by working hands on.

Widgets allow students and teachers to enter queries into Wolfram|Alpha and get back customized results.

Expected soon is a problem generator that will automatically serve up new questions at varying levels of difficulty based on your previous answers.

Currently, algebra is the only course available, but more courses, including calculus and precalculus, are promised soon. To get full access to all Wolfram Education Portal materials, you need to sign up for a free account.

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COD - 1/4/2012 - Bookboon [eBooks]

 

Bookboon, from Denmark, offers university students free quality eBooks that can be downloaded directly in PDF format.

The free online textbooks from Bookboon are focused and succinct, mainly covering the topics of business/economics, engineering/natural sciences, and IT, though they continue to expand their range of subjects.

Bookboon's books are all written by professors from top universities in the world. Currently, over 500 titles are offered in five different languages. The books average about 200 pages, and are being used as both primary and secondary literature.

Bookboon is a product of Ventus Publishing, a company focused on publishing education related books for business professionals and students. In 2005, the company became the first book publishing company in the world to fully focus on free eBooks.

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Catch of the Day - CourseSmart - 7/6/2011

CourseSmart is a provider of digital course materials offering more than 90% of the core textbooks currently being used in North American higher education as e-textbooks.

With CourseSmart, students, faculty, and institutions can find and access the course materials they need all in one place, available for instant access.

Textbook publishing partners:

• Pearson
• Cengage Learning
• McGraw-Hill Education
• Bedford, Freeman & Worth Publishing Group (Macmillan)
• John Wiley & Sons

The CourseSmart catalog of e-resources and digital course materials can be accessed anytime, anywhere from any web browser and on iOS and Android  mobile devices.

CourseSmart offers faculty the advantages of allowing easy textbook evaluation, a complete view of available content, and accessibility. Benefits to students include saving money, convenience, and choice.

CourseSmart is "not only lowering costs and improving access to these essential tools, but is supporting the evolving teaching and learning environment through the significant benefits of digital course materials."

CourseSmart e-textbooks can be read both online and offline.

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Catch of the Day - Flat World Knowledge - 5/27/2011

Flat World Knowledge is the world's largest publisher of free and open college textbooks.

Flat World Knowledge books are free online and open for instructors to modify and customize for their own courses. Flat World Knowledge books are also the center of a social learning network where students learn from each other as well as the books.

Some students will use the books online, but some will prefer other formats. Flat World Knowledge also offers a number of convenient, moderately priced options for these students: print-on-demand softcovers, audio books and chapters, self-print options, and more.

The books offered by Flat World Knowledge are written by experts and are peer-reviewed, edited, and evolved. They are supported by test banks, PowerPoint notes, instructor manuals, print desk copies, and knowledgeable service representatives.

Educators can search the Flat World Knowledge catalog, request a print review copy or review a book online, complete an online adoption form, give a URL to students, and download supplements. You can customize a book before adopting it or anytime afterward.

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Catch of the Day - Hoot of Loot - 10/29/2010

Hoot of Loot is a website designed to enable everyone to buy and sell used or new school supplies, books, furniture, and anything else that is used in education.

Hoot of Loot is the first website to allow registered schools, teachers, and home school parents to place classified ads on a website that specializes in educational products.  School supply vendors can also sell their surplus educational items on the site as well.

Products are sorted in well-organized categories can be easily searched by buyers.

A normal account is for individuals, teachers, and schools that would like to place a classified ad on Hoot of Loot. The buyer contacts the seller to set payment and shipping details. Placing ads is free and there are no commission fees either.

A commercial account is available for companies that would like to place an ad on Hoot of Loot. The buyer places an order with credit card details which go directly to the seller. Hoot of Loot does all the advertising for their sellers with various marketing campaigns.

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Catch of the Day - Inkling - 10/26/2010

Inkling offers digital textbooks for the iPad that are interactive, flexible, and less costly than traditional paper textbooks.

Social collaboration and simple ease-of-use are key features of Inkling's eTextbooks. Other features of the Inkling textbooks are …

• Titles are less expensive than the paper versions, and you can buy them by the chapter.
• Content is specifically tailored for the iPad with high-res artwork and supplementary content not possible in a paper book.
• Search the text and even your own notes.
• Follow others' note streams and see their comments right in the text alongside your own.
• Key terms are tappable for related information. Copy and paste text. User highlights and notes are kept together in a notebook, and quizzes help you learn.

Once you've purchased a title, it will always be available to you to download from inside Inkling. You can even delete and then re-download the content, notes and highlights will be preserved.

Watch a video introduction to Inkling textbooks.

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CK-12 FlexBooks Adds to Physics Text

CK-12 FlexBooks is an open-content, web-based collaborative e-textbook model that I posted about in July.

Along with NASA, they recently announced the addition of a new chapter to CK-12’s 21st Century Physics FlexBook in which students and teachers look at a contemporary NASA space transportation project and learn how simulation-based engineering is used to develop new technology – in this case, the Launch Abort System, a state-of-the-art astronaut escape system.

Go to my earlier post on CK-12 FlexBooks

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Catch of the Day - B&N Desktop eReaders - 8/13/2010

The Barnes & Noble eReader desktop apps for PCs and Macs are excellent free eBook reading software.

With both you can shop for, purchase, and read eBooks in the .pdb format purchased from Barnes & Noble. You can also read any eBooks in the ePub format wherever you acquired them.

Add bookmarks, notes, and highlights to eTexts. Search the full text of books. LendMe™ Technology lets you share eBooks with others. Each version includes an onboard user's guide.



Though both the PC and Mac versions offer a pretty similar basic reading experience, the user interface and extended functionality of each differs dramatically from the other.

In the PC version ...

• Support for touch screen computers and tablets running Windows 7
• Read newspapers and magazines
• Support for documents in PDF format
• Add eBooks from your hard drive to your library for easy access

 

In the Mac version ...

• Open eBooks from anywhere on your hard drive
• Export notes
• Customize virtually every aspect of the page display: fonts, colors, themes, line spacing, etc.
• RSVP highlighted reading aid and Auto Scroll

 

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Catch of the Day - MathTV - 8/11/2010

 

MathTV offers free tutorial videos covering topics in basic math, algebra, geometry, trig, and calculus.

Solutions to each example exercise are demonstrated in two or more short videos by different instructors. In each video, the instructor explains and demonstrates the procedure used to solve the problem. Many  of the exercises include solutions demonstrated by Spanish-speaking teachers.

MathTV is also piloting a series of online eTextbooks. Presently there are texts for Introductory Mathematics, Introductory Algebra, and Intermediate Algebra.

In the MathTV Bookstore, textbooks used in one-semester college courses in mathematics are available for purchase. Most of the examples in each of these books are presented in MathTV videos.

Check out the MathTV Channel on YouTube

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