Teachers and students have a
common tool: books. Does it mean that although we use
computers/tablets/mobile phones we are going to throw away books?
Surely NOT. Today we are lucky to have a bigger choice. No one is
against reading books the old way (ie tangible one where one flips
pages with his own hands).
Nowadays we have more choice in
the sense we can download books unto our electronic gadget without
the need to go outside to a library or shop to buy it. Some students
coming from poor families or families who don't wish to spend their
money on educational books, now can download some books for free!
One can visit the guthenberg
site in order to find around 48,000 FREE e-books. No
student can claim that all books are boring. Having such a big
online library, there is at least one good book for everybody!
We can change the format of the
letters (for dyslesic, or students with a poor eye sight). We can
change the format to fit our electronic gadget (mobile phone, pc or
tablet). One can write on the book. In fact some teachers use it to
let students comment when reading a book. At the end the teacher has
the comments of all students on one book! This was not possible on
physical books as it was heavily prohibited to write on books.
Students can see comments made by other students. Peer to peer
learning is another wonderful tool for students made possible by
electronic books.
Another hidden advantage is
that teachers nowadays can have a proof if students have opened or
not the books because each comment will have a time date! This was
surely not possible with the old system!
The biggest advantage is surely
the fact that when we read educational books we meet new, strange or
undecipherable words. In the old times, we had either to guess the
meaning from the general sense of the sentence or else go for another
book....dictionary. Now one needs to press the word and up comes the
definition!! It's that simple. Now books have become easier.
Our aim today is to introduce
another wonderful free source program which can be used in windows,
mac, android or linux! It's called calibre.
It has all the features
mentioned above and more.
As
usual we are providing some tutorials in case our readers have some
teething problems.
