Audio Books and School20

I like to read, so I haven’t listened to very many audio books on CD or by MP3 for that matter. Nevertheless, today I was rssing around and I came across a few free audio books at simply audio books and I decided to download them. The selection wasn’t that great with them being free, but being the miser that I am, I downloaded them all. The selection ranges from T.S. Elliott to Mark Twain and the readers are superb.

These audio books got me to thinking about how students can benefit from new technologies. For example, at our school we are trying to get a classroom set of iPods or MP3 players to check out from our media center. I plan to utilize these players to create a make shift language lab for my Spanish classes.

After finding these free audio books, I started browsing around and I found another site with a great selection of audio books called LibriVox. LibriVox provides free audio books from the public domain. The only drawback to LibriVox is that the books are read by volunteers like you and me.

Wait! I read well, and with exception to my southern accent, I sound okay doing podcasts. Maybe, I can volunteer and read a few chapters from a book for LibriVox. Better yet, maybe some of the students at my school could read for LibriVox or even create a LibriVox type site for our school. It wouldn’t be that hard. We could use Audacity to record the MP3s and then we could upload them to our school website. Students could take time out of their English classes and take turns reading various chapters from the same book. What a cool collaborative School 2.0 project.

I just wish I had thought of it first. Some schools are already doing this and the ages of the readers range greatly. All students can contribute and learning can be utilized throughout the school. What a concept!

Unfortunately, I noticed that Don Quixote had already been read. Just my luck!

Regards,

William Bishop (Bill)

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