The author, a high school teacher librarian, used grant money to purchase 11 Kindles and an Amazon gift card and at the beginning of the 2009-2010 school year formed a once-a-week Kindle Club with "at-risk" students to motivate them to read. She reports that the experiment was a hit from the first session and that students remained excited to read on their Kindles week after week.
Engel-Unruh attributes the success of the experiment to Kindle features that support struggling readers:
- Access to books of their choice (690,000 titles as of September 2010).
- Teaching students to use Amazon's subject directory to find books on topics they want to read.
- The immediacy of downloads, both of sample material and of the books themselves.
- Adjustable text sizes, dictionary look-up of words, text-to-speech, highlighting, bookmarking, and annotation
- The book-sharing feature of the Kindle (one title can be downloaded to six Kindles) helps build community among the club members. When one student likes a books and other are interested, they can share the book at no additional cost with five other Kindles.
The author provides anecdotal evidence of increased reading but no systematic quantitative data.
After the first year, Engel-Unruh purchased enough additional Kindles to have a class set, which she houses on a cart and loans to classroom teachers.
My thoughts
It sounds like the students only had the Kindles for the one hour each week that the Kindle Club met. I wonder if it would be feasible to let the students have the Kindles longer, like over the weekend, since the club met on Fridays? If they showed interest for the hour, what might they have done with permanent access?
This report supports my suspicion that students would take to Kindles quickly, that the "cool" factor would generate a lot of buzz.
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