Read Print - Free Online Books, Poems, Short Stories

Read Print is a site dedicated to finding Books, Poems, and Shorts Stories online and for completely free!  You can search by author and title to find what you are looking for.  Just on the main page, I saw several that I know are very useful for educators.  You can search for Essays, Fiction, Non-Fiction, Plays, Poetry, and Short Stories.  For those schools struggling with textbook cost, Read Print might be a great option depending on what students are reading. 

When you visit the main page it has a list of the top 250 authors; so to see if this site has an author you are studying that would be a great starting point.  Another great section is quotes.  You can search for quotes by an author or on a certain subject.  What is also great is that the site offer biographical information about the authors as well.

Read Print also has a reading mode that provides a way to easily read each chapter.  The negative, there are ads throughout the text, but they have to pay for the site some how.  Read Print seems to be a very thorough site for online reading, especially for classrooms strapped for cash to purchase books.

Book Glutton

BookGlutton is a website that provides the ability to read books online.  It has eBooks that would be of interest to educators.  I saw "The Scarlet Letter" and "A Tale of Two Cities" on the website for starters.  Several of the books are available for free, others are available for purchase.  In the end it offers a way for students to read books for your class without having to go to the library or purchase a book.  1:1 schools could really benefit from this site when reading books in class.  They do have a search option if you want to try out the site for books in your class.  As they always say, you can't beat free.

MeeGenius - Great Tool for Elementary Teachers

I came across MeeGenius while surfing (is that still a proper term?) the Internet.  It is a collection of books meant for younger students, many of the books with titles we are all familiar with.  First thing I noticed is that you can personalize the books, meaning you can input other names for the main characters.  So like in the book "Jack and the Beanstalk" I was able to put my son's name in place of Jack and other members of my family in the place of other characters.

Right now there are 27 books available for your reading pleasure.  If you don't make any personalizations, the software will highlight each word and read the book aloud to the students in your classroom.  Could be a great way for reading comprehension.  I found the digital voice to be very easy to listen to...not the usual digitized computer voice we are used to hearing.

MeeGenius is also available as an iPhone and iPad app.  I could see me using this in the future with my children.  My son will probably have a laptop by the time he is 5 anyway!

Give MeeGenius a look.  I could see it being used in several Kindergarten and 1st Grade classrooms.  You could use it as a reward to have a certain students' names personalized in the books.

Shelfari

For those of you that keep a webpage or blog, Shelfari would be a good way for you to share the books that you would like to read, are reading, or have read.  It will display the books on a virtual bookshelf.  Your visitors can then hover over the book and get some information about it.  When you click on the book it will take you to Amazon where you can of course get all the advantages of Amazon.

You could use this in your classroom by linking textbooks that you will use in your class as well as books that the students will be reading in your classes.

You can view the books that I want to read in the sidebar of my blog.  Most are History by Howard Zinn, and the other is a book about teenagers and technology, "Digital Natives."