Kindles in the classroom- Getting started

[Barbara Wolf]

I was lucky enough to convince my school to buy 32 Kindles for our Basic Skills students who are in pullout classes.  Now that I have them I am not sure how to get started.  I have one gift card from the PTO for about $300 to buy the Kindle books but now I understand I might have to create separate accounts and payments (gift cards) for each Kindle if I want them to remember the last page read.  I am not sure this is important.  I think my kids are savvy enough to remember (or jot down) the page they left off on.  Is anyone using one funding source for all their Kindles? Also if each Kindle has their own email address can you send individual PDF's to each one?

 

I am hoping to share books (I understand you can share across 6 Kindles) to make the money go farther. Not sure how to do this either.

 

Please- any advice would be greatly appreciated.

 

Barbara Wolf

 

[Lisa Harlow]

I just finished doing this.  You can have up to 6 Kindles on each Amazon account.  I had already put my grant money on one gift card from Amazon, but had to get it refunded and then split it between the 5 accounts.  Each account had the same name w/ a different number (fourthgradekindle, fourthgradekindle2, etc) and then each Kindle in the account was numbered from 1-6.  I've just started to download books.  You add books to one Kindle in each account and then you have the option under Manage My Account to send the book to the 5 other Kindles.  I've also set up my home screen with collections - poetry, historical fiction, etc.  If you set up one Kindle in each group then you can transfer your collections to the other books on the account with just a few button pushes.  It was a little confusing at first, but as long as you set them up with 6 devices to an account you can share anything that you buy between the Kindles in that account.  I have 25 Kindles and it's taken us since last May to register all the devices, get the grant to buy books, set up the accounts, set up more accounts, redistribute the money, etc, but I think we're finally there.  I'm going to spend my Christmas break downloading all the books onto them.  I'm using them for lit circles so some of the books on each group will be different.  I've also found it frustrating that books that I'd like to download are not always available.  We're doing One Book, One School after Christmas using Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of Nimh and it's not available in an ebook.  I was very disappointed as I that that might be a good book for us to learn the kindles with.    Hope some of this helps.  Amazon is going to need to make this more user friendly for schools sometime soon!  Right now it's a very confusing and time consuming process.