Thursday 16 July 2015

Epic!

Yesterday I saw a blog from Abby at Third Grade Bookworm. She was urging everyone to sign up for a FREE educator's subscription to Epic. It looked too good to resist so I checked it out, and it is terrific!


As you can see I was doing this rather late at night and got so engrossed in checking it out that it was far into the night before I said, "Goodnight, iPad!" (I LOVE Scaredy Squirrel and got carried away reading all the books and then thinking of many activities to go with them - upcoming blog topic...)


You can sign up as an educator and can create profiles for up to 32 readers. The readers are able to rate the books they've read and new recommendations are based on their ratings. (I think my students would love this JUST so they could do the ratings!)  I like that I can put in the kids' ages so that the recommendations are around the right reading level for them. 

Some books have audio which will be great support for emergent, struggling, and non readers. When I listened to a couple of them I felt a little impatient because the reading was so slow and mechanical. But then I realized I was doing what I always hope the kids will do - reading ahead of the narrration because I can read so much faster than the narration. Maybe this will encourage them to at least follow along with the text. I know they DON'T when the audio is fluent and expressive. They're happy to just listen.


There's a great selection of books in a wide variety of genres. I was especially pleased with the number of non fiction titles available, and from what I could see many of them do have audio.
I didn't look at selectioons for older kids, but I did see several of these pop up in the recommendations and they have been wildly popular with my grandsons who were in grade 3 and 4 last year. 

The only negative I could find is that there seem to be a large numbers of books about snakes and I (shudder) kept putting my finger on them when I was scrolling.........Ewwwwww!😬

So I recommend that you click here to go and sign up for your subscription!

I am linking this post up with from Teaching Trio's Technology Thursday linky party. Hop over here to see other great ideas that will benefit your classroom!


No comments:

Post a Comment

LinkWithin