E-Book

My mother recently purchased an E-Book for her travels overseas, and being the young one in the family (and to my mother, the technologically advanced one) she asked me to help her set it up. Until then I had never used an E-Book, but after a little bit of research I discovered how wonderful they are. For those who don't know, an E-Book is an 'Electronic Book' - a portable, touchscreen, scrollable text viewer. They come in all different sizes, are widely available, and perform some very similar functions to the iPad - the major differences being that they are much cheaper as they are used purely to read books (meaning on a E-Book you can't gain internet access, download apps, make a phonecall, etc, etc).

I feel that an E-Book could be used as an excellent tool to educate students with a visual impairment. This is because all brands of the E-Book are portable, easy to use, have a battery life that lasts for hours, and by using your finger you can zoom in on pages and increase font size (so for a person with very limited vision, this would be much easier to read than a normal book). There are thousands of titles available for free downloading online, particularly the classics that are now in the public domain, and most recent textbook publications are also being sold in an electronic form to be viewed on an E-Book.

The E-Book would be great tool to help a student with a visual impairment stay on top of their work, and if the student is in a mainstream school it could also potentially eliminate many of the distractions to others in the class that older technology created (such as text to speech readers such as Microsoft Sam). I also feel that the E-book has no age limit at all. It could be used to assist the learning of all students of every age, particularly now that every generation is quickly becoming more technology savvy.



REFERENCES:

http://www.planetebook.com/mainpage.asp?webpageid=91 (first accessed 13th July, 2011)

http://www.ebna.org/using-e-readers-in-the-classroom.html (first accessed 11th July, 2011)

http://www.ebook.com/ (first accessed 27th June, 2011)

Photo:

http://www.blogcdn.com/downloadsquad.switched.com/media/2009/03/sony-ebook-reader.jpg (first accessed 28th July, 2011)