Quote:
Originally Posted by Pinecone
You could also choose a different reader. One without wifi.  |
Pinecone,
I wish sometimes I could. But actually, we are pretty tied in to the Kindle (especially at THIS point).
The grantor originally wanted the Kindle specifically because of the text-to-speech capability. I found that it was fairly clunky to use the way he intended, and I investigated a number of different readers, including the Nook, Kobo, and Sony, possibly a couple others. At that point wifi issues were not on the radar screen. (Kobo is right out not just because of Borders' problems but because their dictionary is horrid -- inflected forms of words are not linked, least not that I could ever get to work, and the sales folks literally had no clue -- but as far as I can remember, Kobo was the only one that didn't have wifi).
We narrowed it to the Nook (especially when the touch screen version came out) and the Kindle (price on both, honoring our grantors wish for text-to-speech keeping Kindle in play). As it turns out, when I mentioned these issues to the district rep and principal, they actually
want the text-to-speech. So, Kindle it is.
Important to note: we are
not pushing Kindle specifically; we are not looking for special deals from them; we do not intend to be their shill. A comparison of text readers would have to be just that -- randomly assigning kids to Kindle vs Nook vs whatever other. Our study will say very little about Kindle (other than maybe that text-to-speech is helpful,
if the kids report using it) and definitely not say anything one way or the other about other eReaders, and instead the focus is about kids having eReaders at home. Quite honestly, I think the touch screen would have been handier for the kids looking up words. But Nooks also have wifi at the very least, as far as I know. (And with Nook, I
think I can only register 6 per device, so we actually would have to buy more copies of books than with Kindle, where we can get away with one copy and just have only 6 kids reading it at a time if it's popular.)
But if we were to do a followup study and not use Kindle, what readers do you know of that don't have wifi? (That aren't Kobo, that is :-) )
Thanks, Carolyn