By Jennifer Baljko

 

Kids, regardless of where they live or what social or cultural background they come from, have a natural ability to pick up a device, fiddle around with the drop-down menus, and figure out how to make the technology work for them.

It was no different when students in Ghana and Clearwater, Fla. were handed an e-reader. Curious expressions soon faded as the kids bounded through the training and moved beyond uncertainty to mastery.

This week, we’ve painted a picture of how two of the world’s largest e-reader pilots — spearheaded by Worldreader and Clearwater High School (CHS)—have evolved in the last 12-18 months. We examined the technology issues and talked about the value of building meaning relationships with publishers and content providers.

But the true test of whether it would all come together and actually affect change depended on what happened in the classrooms. This is where we saw some striking similarities and differences.

In Ghana, the first hurdle we had to overcome was a language barrier, especially with the younger children. While English is the language used in the schools, the kids were less familiar with words like “Settings” and the differences between “Back” and “Previous Page.”

The older kids in both pilots, though, took to the Kindles relatively quickly and within a couple of weeks made them their own. In both cases, on opposite sides of the world, kids did what kids do. They figured out how to download music, deregister the pilot-controlled account, create a personal log-on, and find social media platforms.

School administrators reined in that activity, reminding student about promises they made when the devices were distributed. In Florida’s case, students signed an Internet use agreement, said Bonnie Kelley, Clearwater High School’s supervisor of library media technology. In Ghana, students and the broader community took a pledge to support the program and care for the devices.

Once the initial excitement of having a 3G and Wi-Fi enabled e-reader in their hands died down, kids and teachers settled into a more normal routine. Electronic books that had been pushed in the classrooms were being read, teachers found new ways to incorporate e-readers into lesson plans, and kids were getting into the habit of using digital materials.

Some other noteworthy things happened as well.

In Clearwater, the Kindles became an equalizer, something that leveled the playing field between higher-achieving students and those that have been traditionally seen as lower-achievers, said John Just, assistant superintendent of MIS for Pinellas County Schools.

“There were students who would see a textbook or a novel in printed form and didn’t connect with it. For whatever reason, they hadn’t been successful in using them,” he said. “This [pilot] created a new opportunity for them. Some of the most compelling feedback we got when we walked around the different classrooms came from those classrooms with students who were struggling and those lower-level reading classes. Kids were using the tools like the dictionary, highlighting sections of the text. Those tools were very helpful for them.”

John also pointed out an interesting contrast to this dynamic.

“In some of the higher-achieving classes, the kids shrugged and said ‘Ah, I kind of like my book,’” John said, adding that those students had previous successes and a comfort level with printed books. “For many of the struggling students who had never, in many cases, had the ability to acquire such a device, it offered a new lease on learning.”

The books the high school students choose to read and how they related to them also raised eyebrows, said Bonnie.

“I didn’t think they would take to highlighting text, making comments, and sharing that with their teachers. But they did,” Bonnie said. “The students connected to the text, and made connections to themselves.”

“The day we distributed the Kindles, I was standing behind a girl and overheard, ‘Oh, look! I have Pride and Prejudice on my Kindle. I can’t wait to read it!” added Bonnie. “I’m a former English and reading teacher, and I know how kids respond to certain books. That was a real shocker.”

Understanding the motivation behind what makes kids latch onto to reading and which books they choose to read is as important as tracking improvements in reading fluency and comprehension, said Colin McElwee, Worldreader’s managing director.

“For a program that’s based around a piece of technology, technology, in this case, is the least important piece. What’s much more important is the content being used in education and the human behavior around that,” Colin said.

Since the kids in Ghana have a much different starting point with books—something highlighted in this video— the way they use the device is slightly different, too. Because they have so little access to printed materials, they are using the Kindles to discover the world and learn about things that had not been readily available to them.

Besides the e-books Worldreader delivered to them, kids are downloading international and regional newspapers and magazines, free samples, textbooks, other local content, and public domain books. They’re interested in sports, religion, fiction, and non-fiction. They are reading at the market, with their families, and teaching each other the Kindle’s ins and outs. Even when school is not in session, they show up, excited about flipping through more virtual ink.

“We’re trying to gauge what they’re interested in reading. We want to know what’s challenging them,” said Colin. “Over time we’ll get much better at knowing what their understanding is of particular passages or texts.”

While anecdotal evidence is nice, the real proof is in the pudding. We’re waiting for final numbers to come in, but our preliminary findings show improvements in reading fluency and reading comprehension. In one primary school, for instance, students improved on average 13% from their scores five months earlier. We’ll update you as we review the stacks of data coming in.

So where do CHS and Ghana go from here? Thankfully, both projects will continue.

In Florida, school administrators are increasing their e-book database, researching how teachers are adopting technology, and extending teacher training and coaching. School administrators are examining ways to pilot similar programs in other schools throughout the district, and will consider the trade-offs between e-readers and tablets, such as Apple’s iPad.

In Ghana, Worldreader is working with the same group of students as they move up a grade, and plans to expand the program to include other grade levels in the future. We’re talking to more publishers and authors as well. We’ve also expanded into Kenya and are looking at other opportunities in Africa and elsewhere, with the aim of reaching a million kids by 2015.

Have you heard of any other large-scale e-reader pilots? Tell us about it on our Facebook page or via Twitter at @worldreaders.

Photo credits: Ghana photos by Worldreader. Clearwater High School photos courtesy of the Pinellas County School’s Communication Office.

By Jennifer Baljko

About 18 months ago, before Worldreader even had office space, the team unpacked 20 Kindle 2s, and a handful of children’s books were uploaded onto the e-readers. With ambitious plans sketched out on paper and a lot hope in their suitcases, Worldreader’s Colin McElwee, David Risher, and Mike Sundermeyer flew from Barcelona to Ghana and started to test what would soon become our iRead pilot.

About the same time last year, using money from a four-year technology fund, Clearwater, Fla. High School (CHS) administrators purchased about 150 Kindle 2s, and handed them to teachers. They wanted to make sure the educators had plenty of time to get used to their new classroom tool. When the following school year started, e-readers would be in nearly all of the students’ hands, replacing the bulky textbooks they lugged around.

A few months later, the pilot programs were officially launched, and have since become the largest institutional e-reader rollouts anywhere in the world (so far, no one else has come forward to prove us wrong). Now that the initial pilots have come to a close and the next steps are already being phased in, we thought it was good time to reflect on how far both programs have come – and how they have evolved – since the early bright-idea days. Last week, we kicked off the three-part series with a look at the technology and networking capabilities. Today, we’ll talk about the publishing and content distribution side of the puzzle.

We all know content is king, and with increased global connectivity via the Internet and mobile phone networks, information is everywhere, coming in from many different sources at any given time. E-book sales are also growing hand over fist as more people transition from printed to digital materials. In fact, Publishers Weekly reported last month that e-book sales for the first half of calendar 2011 rose 161%, to $473.8 million for the 15 major publishing houses that feed data up to the Association of American Publishers.

Although e-books have gained popularity among individual consumers, getting publishing companies, media outlets, and other content providers to donate age-appropriate digital books that have educational value in a classroom setting, without being disruptive to lesson plans, and where hundreds or thousands of students would have easy access, well, let’s just say that takes some persuasion. Impressively, though, both Clearwater and Worldreader have made significant strides on this front, ensuring that their students have a mini-library of books in the palms of their hands. But there’s still work to be done, and many more opportunities stand to take root.

At CHS, the pilot’s main objectives were to start migrating away from printed textbooks and supplemental teaching materials and better utilize technology in the school. This is an issue that soon many school districts, at least in the United States, will confront. State legislators, including those in Florida, are passing laws that will require public school districts to spend some percentage of their book budgets on digital content within a few years time, or redefine the digital and print divide. E-readers, tablets, and perhaps some other device in an early-stage development stage will be finding their way into any number of classrooms in the near future.

Ahead of the curve, a CHS teacher, using the e-reader during the test phase, stumbled upon the availability of the CK-12 series of e-books, which led to the decision to purchase math and language arts textbooks and supplemental science and reading materials, said John Just, assistant superintendent of MIS for Pinellas County Schools.

At launch, roughly 100 books were available to the staff and students at Clearwater High, 60 of which were purchased, noted Jim Bence, the school district’s computer support analyst in the Office of Library Media/Technology. Within the last year, the high school uploaded other free and paid books, mostly classics like Gulliver’s Travels and Pride and Prejudice, and local newspapers, bringing the average up to about 15 to 20 books on each student’s e-reader, he said.

This year, additional textbooks and learning materials in other subject areas, including science and English, are on the e-readers, and future Kindle store purchases are being planned.  When kids and teachers returned to school this year, they had about 50 titles each, on average, added Jim.

“One of the biggest challenges is content. We are on conference call after conference call trying to convince publishers to give us material in the format that we need,” said John. “That is the biggest detriment at this point to making the program an even bigger success. They see this as a big affront to what they are trying to do. People sat across the table from us and said you’ll never be able to do that.”

Yet, they did. And so did Worldreader, which had a different starting point than CHS but ended up with many similar outcomes.

Although Worldreader’s goal is to give people the world over access to books by leveraging existing technology, building a culture of reading has to begin at the school level. Going that route in a developing country often involves forging deep relationships with government organizations and international and regional publishers.

From go, Worldreader teamed up with USAID to fund the program’s measurement and evaluation portion, and has worked closely with Ghana’s Ministry of Education to get the pilot off the ground last November with about 500 students across different grade levels. Conversations about how to expand it  in the next few years are currently underway, said Worldreader’s Managing Director Colin McElwee.

On the content side, while it was clear that we would have access to the same literary classics as CHS and we could find textbooks that would meet the curriculum requirements, we would have to go beyond that if we wanted reading to stick. The handful of children’s books we initially delivered, which included Fairy Tales Every Child Should Know, Folks Tales From Ghana, and a Curious George and Magic Tree House volume, had only whetted the kids’ appetite.

We began having discussions with big-name publishing companies,  including Random House and Penguin, and authors such as Mary Pope Osborne, Holly Black, Cory Doctorow, Keith Thomas, Janet Wong, and Daniel Pinkwater (other notable writers will be announced in the coming quarters).

Early on, too, the team chose to loop in African authors, such as Meshack Asare, Ellen Banda-Aaku, and Chika Unigwe, and publishers like Smartline, Afram, and Sub-Saharan. We wanted to offer a breadth of content that not only had international appeal, but also would give the local market access to their own regional literary icons. More importantly, we realized almost immediately that stories had to relate to the students’ cultural context, which is lacking in most Western literature. Later this week, we’ll look at why that was relevant and what happened when kids got the e-readers in their hands.

Between our launch with just a few books and today, you’ll find 352 international and African titles in our Worldreader database. On average, each student and teacher now has 99 Worldreader-delivered books on his e-reader plus whatever samples and free, public domain books they downloaded individually.

To make donating their books more appealing to publishers and to encourage the idea of building a long-term relationship, Worldreader is providing publishers with market research about which books are being read, Colin added.

“With our publishers in Ghana, we share with them insights about which books the kids are reading and why. We package that information and report it back to the publishers,” Colin said. “Although the publishers are giving us their books for free for the pilot program, they are getting feedback from the market and from a new digital platform. That’s incredibly valuable for them.”

How publishers will continue to adapt to programs like those being pioneered in Clearwater and Ghana will surely be a topic of conversation at the upcoming Frankfurt Book Fair, one of the industry’s marquee events. Our Director of Digital Publishing Elizabeth Wood will be there, and will certainly have lots to share when she returns.

Until then, we’ll wrap up this series on Friday with a post about the in-classroom e-reader experience and some surprising results coming out of Clearwater and Ghana.

 

 

 Photo credits :

Ghana photos by Worldreader.

Clearwater High School photos courtesy of the Pinellas County School’s Communication Office.

By Jennifer Baljko

About a year ago, 500 children and teachers in Kade and Adeiso, Ghana came to school and found e-readers filled with a total of 25,000 e-books. In the United States, a similar thing happened at Clearwater, Fla. High School—2,100 e-readers loaded with math and language arts books were being rolled out as new classroom learning tools.

It was the beginning of two very different e-reader pilot programs in two very different parts of the world. Worldreader’s “Books For All” goal was to empower people by encouraging a culture of reading in places where books are nearly impossible to find. In the Pinellas County School District, the project aimed to arm every student with new technology and to start replacing printed textbooks with digital ones. Both pilots – still the largest e-reader programs in any school worldwide as far as we know – have unveiled common themes: E-readers can help level the learning field while creating excitement about reading.

Over the next week, we’ll to take a closer look at the similarities, differences, lessons learned, and future plans with a focus on technology adoption, content availability, and classroom results. Let’s look at the technology issues first.

One of the big questions that had to be answered early on was: Which device makes the most sense to use in a classroom setting? Laptops serve many purposes, and teachers frequently find their multi-functional attributes distracting in a learning environment. E-readers, however, do one thing well—they read books. Although networking access expands e-reader use and usefulness, educators see the benefits of working with a single-function tool.

Amazon’s track record with the Kindle product line, its vast amount of available content, and its well-established electronic book distribution process made it an appealing choice. Worldreader and Clearwater High School opted for the same device – the six-inch Kindle 3G with Wi-Fi. In the field, the devices have been durable enough to survive the kids’ natural rough handling and Florida and Ghana’s humid climates, but both organizations are talking with Amazon about improvements that would make the e-readers even more resilient.

Likewise, as we’ve discussed before, e-readers have another advantage over computers in that they operate on widely accessible 3G mobile phone technology, which can deliver e-books to individuals in a matter of seconds in the most remote parts of the world.

The platform is not as good, though, when large numbers of e-books need to be downloaded to hundreds or thousands of e-readers simultaneously.

Bonnie Kelley, Clearwater High School’s supervisor of library media technology, recalled how the local cell phone network stopped working when all the students and teachers powered on their e-readers at the same time.

“We distributed the e-readers in about two and half days. On the second day around lunchtime, I said to the principal, ‘You know I can’t make a phone call and I can’t send this email,’” Kelley said. “AT&T [the local carrier] had contacted the district and said we had shut down their network around the area of the school. That was the first lesson we learned. Turning on all these 3G devices need support. We had never even thought about it and never anticipated it.”

AT&T bumped up service in the area, and school administrators eventually built a campus Wi-Fi system to reduce pressure on the phone network. The downside is that school districts in developing areas, where resources are scarce, won’t be able to take similar measures.

This is where Worldreader is learning that corporate partnerships may alleviate some of these now-known issues. Companies like Amazon, mobile phone carriers, and network providers may find a wealth of front-end and back-end technology opportunities that could better serve leading-edge wholesale and institutional e-reader distributors entering the market, added Worldreader’s Managing Director Colin McElwee.

“Worldreader has worked with Amazon to develop systems better suited to getting a large amount of books to a large amount of kids and segmenting those groups between kids, teachers, kids of different ages, and kids in different classrooms,” he said. “The front-end of the technology [the device itself] works pretty well. But the back-end of the technology – the distribution side – has been particularly challenging. Everybody, including Amazon, has learned a lot about the opportunities that are out there for developing better systems.”

Actual hands-on, in-classroom technology adoption was another area that initially raised concerns for both Worldreader and Clearwater High School. Would the teachers and student latch on to the device and a new way of teaching and learning? Would this particular technology make a difference in the classroom environment? We’ll dive more into this topic in the final installment of this three-part series, but the short answer is “Yes,” for different reasons.

In Florida, because the technology is being used to replace traditional printed textbooks and requires a change in teaching behavior, teacher acceptance varied, said John Just, assistant superintendent of MIS for Pinellas County Schools. There were pockets of resistance, where a lukewarm response greeted the introduction of a new book platform. Others were uncertain if it would work, but were willing to try it out. Some teachers dove straight in, and soon became advocates who helped others further along the learning curve. Positive reinforcement ended up being an important element to getting teachers onboard.

“Positive reinforcement for using the device and efforts to use it are needed for both the students and the teachers. Just because you’ve bought the devices and put them out there, it doesn’t mean that people are going to be able to use them,” John said. “They need to be supported, and teachers need continuous professional development.”

In Ghana, we saw a different reaction. Like Clearwater, Worldreader dedicated time to teacher technology training, but within a short time, it was evident teachers were ready to go, and go quickly. The teachers in Ghana, many of whom have no books or, at best, have a limited number of books they can teach with, immediately saw the e-reader’s potential. More importantly, because e-readers are not seen or categorized as a computer that would undermine their authority in the classroom or something that would threaten their position in the community, teachers enthusiastically embraced the technology, said Colin.

“The e-reader is perceived and appreciated as a book, partly because of its form factor and partly because it is a book. It just happens to be 3,500 books. It’s not seen as a platform for doing many other things.” Colin added. “Teachers in Ghana are using it in the classroom, and use it enormously at home to read what they like, which is also important. They enjoy it, they are discovering the joy of reading, and have become ambassadors for it. If they are an ambassador, they will be enthusiastic about whatever it is that they love, and the kids will pick up on that.”

Next up, we’ll talk about the content Worldreader and Clearwater High Schools is making available to students and teachers, and the work that’s being done with publishers to ensure ongoing access to regional and international e-books.

 

by Susan Moody

I have been thinking about Clearwater, Florida a lot recently, which is a little odd, because I have never been there.  Yet, my interest might be explained by the fact that to date, Amazon is actively working with two pilot programs with Kindles in K-12 schools: in Clearwater, Florida and in Ghana with Worldreader.  So, understandibly, I was wondering what their experience was like; I was curious to see if there were any similarities.  I reached out to John Just, Assistant Superintendent of MIS for Pinellas County Schools, we swapped war stories, and found interesting comparisons in how this new technology works in schools in the developing world contrasted to the developed world.

In a write-up for Worldreader, Mr. Just explained Clearwater’s experiences.  To begin, Clearwater had more to choose from, like the iPad which, according to NYT’s Winnie Hu, is being piloted in Long Island schools, but after a committee looked at all options, they chose the Kindle.  Meanwhile, Worldreader’s choice of the Kindle was directed by which e-reader could work the best in the most remote areas of the world.  I was surprised that the process of setting-up was largely the same.  Both pilots implemented a complex assembly line, run by a team of dedicated volunteers, and both set-ups took a very long time.  Doesn’t this picture of our friends in Florida look a lot like these?  What it means is that this is no easy task for anyone to launch, wherever they are in the world, Clearwater and Worldreader are both pioneers in this.

Both pilot programs are in conversations with Amazon on a weekly basis.  This is no surprise either-  there is a lot to communicate.  Both pilots are working closely with publishers: in our case, with publishers in Africa whose content we are digitizing and Random House, who generously donated thousands of titles.  In their case, they’re working with textbook publishers, who were initially reluctant to digitize textbooks but Clearwater prevailed.

Biggest Challenges?  Now this is surprising: both pilots have the same challenges with technology–kids involuntarily deregistering their Kindles and lack of parental controls.  Mr Just wrote: “we knew that we were having issues with students deregistering the school account and registering their personal account interfering with the download of books. The lack of enterprise controls on the Kindle made this tough to avoid, but something we needed to address with more awareness and dealing with inappropriate content.”  Right now, Amazon doesn’t offer parental controls on the Kindle; both programs hope this will change.

Regarding teacher training, Mr. Just wrote: “The training in pre-service days with Amazon and staff at the school was not enough for every teacher to feel comfortable and, if they did, even know exactly what to do with them.  More training was definitely needed and more information to provide them with basic use and troubleshooting…  There is probably a very small amount of teachers who just don’t want this to work but most do.”  I think this might be the largest difference between the two programs: the teachers in Ghana are profoundly motivated for e-readers to work in their classroom because before there were no books.  We will be producing a video in the next couple of days where teachers explain how it had been very difficult to plan for class when they had no materials.

Overall, there are some surprising similarities in two very different contexts, and I haven’t even touched on the students’ reactions here.  The deeper differences stem from the fact that Worldreader’s pilot is in a place where access to books is the problem.  Worldreader has been thrilled by Clearwater’s eagerness to work with synergies and create a partnership between the two programs.  We are talking about students sharing their favorite literature, writing competitions and other ideas.  These two programs, both pioneers with e-readers in the classroom, will hopefully be able to share their cultures with each other.

You can read John’s interesting write-up here, and follow him on twitter: @johnjust