Kindles

Greetings!

This week I am thrilled to tell you that I am, I mean Rogers Adventist School is the proud owner of 12 new Kindle Fire devices. Here’s what I did to make this happen.

I applied for the Don R. Keele grant. If you don’t happen to be in the NPUC, you may not be aware of this award. It is a grant that supports innovation in the classroom or school. I thought that having e-readers would be interesting and fun and would be another tool to motivate reading. I filled out the grant application and then presented it to our school board for approval.
I won an award of $3000.00 from the Keele Foundation and another $1000.00 from the NPUC to support my work as the Resource Librarian for the NPUC. Of course I was thrilled!

I chose Kindles because I am already very familiar with Amazon.com and own two Kindles of my own. I wanted to have the “read to me” feature and only two of the devices have that feature – the Kindle Keyboard and the Kindle Fire. Both of these options were priced similarly so I decided to go with the Fire because it has color and the picture books on the devices would look beautiful. I also looked to the future and thought that it might be important at some point to have them used in the classrooms as a computer.

In my research I found that Amazon.com has made provision for schools to connect multiple devices to one account that can be controlled by one administrator. This was important to me since we don’t want students to be downloading items to the Kindles on their own. I have all of them registered through WhisperCAST. It can be confusing because Amazon also has WhisperNET and WhisperSYNC. (The capitals are mine.) I called Amazon and got tech support throughout the process of registering. They can also help you decide which Kindle to choose.

I opted to pay the extra money to get Kindles without ads. I figured that our students are bombarded every day with advertisements and this would be one place that was ad-free. My school board members agreed with me on that. I also purchased chargers, an extra sturdy Otter Box case rather than the leather one, and the two year warranty. So each Kindle cost in the neighborhood of $315.00 with everything included. I have also put about 30 books on them, a number of which were free. I’m glad I had library funds to help with book purchases because I did go over my $4000.00 grant.

We will be using the Kindles for student check-out. (I will admit that I woke up in the middle of the night worrying about that and wondering if I would actually be able to let a kid take one of my expensive toys!) I have also talked to teachers and let them know that if they want to use them in the classroom, they need to reserve them well ahead of time. I will be taking them around next week to each classroom and sharing them with the students and talking about how to use them and care for them.

If you are interested in more information, I will be happy to share my experience.

Have a great week.

Audrey