This week I’m taking a few days off to ski, play with my dogs, visit with friends and family, and generally recharge my batteries. If you’re on vacation this week too, I hope that you’re having a great vacation. While I’m away I’m rerunning the most popular posts of the year. The selections are based on pageviews during 2012.
This post is born out of a request for help from someone that I met at
the Teacher 2 Teacher conference in Bow Island, Alberta. She was looking
for some free online talking storybooks to use in her grade 1 class. I
didn’t have anything coming to mind right off, so I searched Diigo and
my blog archives to find these three places to find and free online
talking children’s storybooks.
MeeGenius
is a nice source of free and paid ebooks for kids. There are lots of
sites that offer the same thing as MeeGenius but MeeGenius distinguishes
itself with one excellent feature. That feature is automatic word
highlighting to accompany the narration of each book. When children open
the ebooks online, on an Android tablet, or on an iPad they can choose
to have the story read to them or to read the story on their own. When
the story is read to them each word in the story is highlighted on the
page. This should help children follow along with the story.
The Woodlands Junior School
is a school website based in the UK. I’ve previously featured their
site as a good place to find educational games for elementary age
students. In my search yesterday, I discovered that they also have a nice collection of links to free online talking storybooks.
Magic Keys is another site with a good collection of talking picture books for children.
Magic Keys seemed a bit tricky to navigate at first so I would
recommend that you use it to find storybooks for your students rather
than sending your students to the site on their own.
I know there are a lot of good iPad and Android apps for talking
storybooks, but web-based versions are a little more elusive. If you
have a site that should be added to this list, please leave a comment.
