lifehacker.com: The Kindle is great for reading the occasional book, but you might not know that it's also a fantastic tool for students. When used correctly, it can essentially operate as a portable tool to keep all your books, notes, and research in one place. Here's how to turn a Kindle into your new best friend for school.
5 comments:
I have been adamantly against getting any sort of e-reader as a lover of books. I personally enjoy the turning of the page and the way the book feels in your hand. I got an older generation iPad from a family member when they got themselves a new one and have barely used it seeing as I buy all my books in paper form. Now being in school though the Kindle app has been a lifesaver. For my elective classes I needed to purchase about four books each and was not thrilled to have to be carrying them around with so decided to try the kindle thing out. So far it has been working wonderfully, I can take notes and highlight right in the book without having to carry around multiple books. Even better then that I can download readings from Blackboard to the app and highlight there too. If you do not already have a kindle or another device with the same abilities I highly recommend it to every student.
Luckily in my area of education textbooks are a rarity but if I did have to buy some I would definitely get the e-book version. I really don't like carrying around big heavy books especially since my laptop weighs about a ton already. I also love the bookmark and word look up functions available on the kindle. Not to mention the price difference is pretty hard to ignore.
I'm trying to navigate the waters of a "PaperSmart" existence, and I'm purchasing all the e-books I can for school. This article had some really exciting tips, particularly about the "send to Kindle" and some Evernote compatibilities. Being able to import PDFs and other readings for class into my Kindle app for a centralized library is going to be super helpful for keeping organized. I'm really glad I found this article while I have some time to set up systems for using it!
I'm a strong supporter of allowing students to use e-readers in class. E-readers are amazingly useful for quickly finding a page that you're trying to reference. This becomes practical in scenarios when class discussion leads to text reference and you can't find the page. Its also extremely useful for quickly sorting through notes that you took about the book. Hopefully professors will start allowing and understanding the practical use of e-readers in class.
I have owned a Kindle for many years now and I use it a far bit, but not as much as I would like to. The reason I don't use it all the time is not that I don't like it or that I forget about it, it's because the school system isn't set up for it. For example many of the texts that I have to read are uploaded to blackboard as PDFs and most of the time these PDFs are just images. There is not actually text stored in the file. This means that I get a free copy of the text with no work, but that I also don't get to put it on my kindle (mine can't do images) and more importantly I can't search it. I'm not all that good at skimming, but I rock at searching, so this is a real problem for me. I love the idea of everyone using digital texts, because I like that format better for all the reasons that this article talks about, but I don't think that the school system and teachers are ready for that. I hope that in the near future I'll be able to read all my books on my Kindle.
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