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Kindle Pilot Program With Struggling Readers and ESL Students: Looking for Feedback

A colleague of mine and I are working on a possible pilot program to use kindles with approximately 50 of our students. We are extremely interested in the text to speech feature on the kindle, as our goal is to increase fluency with our struggling readers. I work at a high priority school in Union County North Carolina where many of students are struggling readers, with a large number of them speaking English as a second language. Over 85% of our students are on free and reduced lunch and many come from low socioeconomic backgrounds. I have read several articles on e readers and have determined that the Kindle appears to be the logical choice for our students. I do have some questions though.

1. How many machines can you download the same book to?
2. Does Amazon provide a discount to schools?
3. How do you all handle keeping the students from being able to freely order books on their kindles?
4. Is the text to speech feature an actual human voice? Has anyone seen success in using this feature to increase fluency?
5. What positive effects have you all seen in using the kindle with struggling readers? Have any of you used kindles specifically with ESL students?

I would appreciate any information or feedback that any of you could give on how you have used kindles in your school.

Tags: ESL, Fluency, Readers, Struggling, Students

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Permalink Reply by Elizabeth Roberts on September 11, 2010 at 12:14pm

I am starting a similiar program at my school. Here is what I have learned:
1. This summer Amazon told me there is no discount or special pricing for schools.
2. The average number of devices that can download the same book is 6, although it actually depends on the publisher and the number f licenses the particular book is allowed. I created 3 separate accounts for my 15 Kindles and buy a book 3 times to download to all of them at once.
3. There is a feature that allows you to disable the "one click" purchases which discourages student purchase, in addition to turnig the wireless feature off, which also preserves the battery!
4. The text to speech voice is a little stiff in my opinion for just listening to a story, however, pronouncing unknown words on the spot is a huge advantage verses not having a clue what the word is or how it is pronounced.
5. I am currently using them on ESL students and the excitement that has been created is amazing. It is still too early to measure concrete results, but every kid in the school is begging to be in my class!