View Single Post
Old 10-29-2010, 09:24 PM   #7
Elfwreck
Grand Sorcerer
Elfwreck ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.Elfwreck ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.Elfwreck ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.Elfwreck ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.Elfwreck ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.Elfwreck ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.Elfwreck ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.Elfwreck ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.Elfwreck ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.Elfwreck ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.Elfwreck ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.
 
Elfwreck's Avatar
 
Posts: 5,185
Karma: 25133758
Join Date: Nov 2008
Location: SF Bay Area, California, USA
Device: Pocketbook Touch HD3 (Past: Kobo Mini, PEZ, PRS-505, Clié)
Quote:
Originally Posted by ficbot View Post
This is a hard question to answer because there is a ton of available material but what you want is really a curated collection and somebody has to do the curating.
At the moment, that's "me and whoever else I can rope into helping." Which may mean nobody other than random advice. (In which case, the resulting collection won't be winning any awards for Best Inner-City Library. But it'll be more than they've got now, and might work to get some of the kids aware of ebooks and interested in reading for pleasure.)
Quote:
- Cory Doctorow has two YA novels available for free under a Creative Commons license. Little Brother is pretty good; haven't read the other one yet. I think he even has some teaching resources for Little Brother.
The other is "For the Win," and it's glorious; my daughter's read it & shared it with friends. Definitely both of those go in the collection; I'll need to talk to school people to sort out what else of Doctorow's might be acceptable. (My standards are skewed; I've got no idea if "Makers" is too mature for teens. Or, more accurately, too mature for parents of teens to be aware of.)
Quote:
- Orwell: 1984 and Animal Farm are freely available and I remember at least one of them being on the curriculum when I was in school. 1984 would be a great one to study along with Big Brother...
I'd love that, but it's not in PD in the US. I'm willing to contact publishers/authors' heirs to try for permission, but I don't expect that to work.

Quote:
- John Scalzi has a freebie here that is very good and kids would enjoy it. Fun one for a free choice read.
Yep, that's a fun one.

Quote:
- You might consider teaching a parent volunteer how to do some basic HTML formatting to save Wikipedia articles as proper ebooks kids could download and read on devices...
I am the parent volunteer. It's not unlikely I'm the most net-savvy parent connected to the school. (It's also very possible I'm not; it's a high-tech area.)

No ebook devices. These will be read almost exclusively on school or home computers, although I may try to include info on how to read them on phones. (I suspect that "read on phones" has limited appeal. I know how many people who *love* ebooks will deal with 3" screens, and I don't expect that percentage to be any higher among kids who don't like reading in general.)

I can do wikipedia-pages-as-PDFs, but I'd need a reason why they can't just go to Wikipedia for that info. (A collection of related pages might be useful. I'll be talking with some of the teachers about what kind of nonfic would be good.)
Elfwreck is offline   Reply With Quote