Acquiring Electronic Texts (E-Texts)
The importance digital media brings to an instructional situation is central to the recently adopted National Instructional Materials Accessibility Standard (NIMAS), which offer national guidelines for K-12 electronic book publishers on universal file formats (NIMAS, 2006). For more detailed information visit, http://nimas.cast.org/. When electronic books are developed under NIMAS standards, digital formats are usable across an array of assistive and technological devices (NIMAS, 2006). Several websites provide electronic book respositories that may be useful to teachers and students including Read Print http://www.readprint.com, The Accessible Book Collection
http://www.accessiblebookcollection.org/FAQs.htm, and The Digital Book Index http://www.digitalbookindex.com/about.htm. When using digital texts, we have can provide a wider range of options for students in using assistive and instructional strategies such as embedded speech-to-text assistance, clickable enlargement, text notes, and reading/highlight aloud.
Comments
Digital text is a great thing to have in class for when you want to reduce the reading requirement for students in secondary settings--high school textbooks are often written at a reading level far beyond the students in the class; being able to select and highlight parts of the text, rather than whole sections and chapters, makes life a lot easier!
Posted by: Susanne | July 12, 2006 11:26 AM