Through a tweet by Katherine Schulten earlier this week, I learned about an announcement by the White House about the new free Open eBooks app and program.
If you teach at a Title One school, on a military base, or are a special education teacher anywhere in the U.S., you can gain access for your students to the Open eBooks app. That app allows students to upload up to ten books at a time, which can continually be replenished. And the book catalog looks extraordinary. Here’s the list:
- Bloomsbury: Providing unlimited access to over 1,000 of its most popular titles.
- Candlewick: Providing unlimited access to all relevant children’s and young-adult eBook titles in their catalog.
- Cricket Media: Offering full digital access to all of its market-leading magazines for children and young adults, including Ladybug and Cricket.
- Hachette: Offering access to a robust catalog of their popular and award-winning titles.
- HarperCollins: Providing a vast selection of their award-winning and popular titles.
- Lee & Low: Providing unlimited access to over 700 titles from this leading independent publisher of multicultural books.
- Macmillan: Providing unlimited access to all of the K-12 age-appropriate titles in their catalog of approximately 2,500 books.
- National Geographic: Providing unlimited access to all of their age-appropriate content.
- Penguin Random House: Committing to provide an extensive offering of their popular and award-winning books.
- Simon & Schuster: Providing access to their entire e-catalog of books for children ages 4-14, comprised of 3,000 titles.
Students can read them on a tablet or smartphone, and a web version is coming later this year.
This seems to me like an amazing opportunity. You can sign-up for it here and read more about it at Ed Surge’s article, The White House and Michelle Obama Release $250M ‘Open eBooks’ App for Title I and Special Education Teachers.
I’ve embedded a video from Michelle Obama announcing the app at the bottom of this post.
I’m adding this info to:
- The Best Websites To Help Beginning Readers
- The Best Websites For Beginning Older Readers
- The Best Websites For Intermediate Readers
(by the way, I just updated and revised this list)
Is anyone else surprised Scholastic is not one of the donating publishers?
Love this. As a school librarian, I was very impressed by the collection offered. What a boon for my students!