Sunday, August 27, 2006

Audiobooks & The Millennials

Audio on the Internet is reshaping the way English teachers think about their curriculum and the resources they use. Back in the pre-digital kid days English teachers bought sets of books, including sets of novels they would read in class for the year. Today’s English teachers have a whole new set of tools to use on the Internet.

Audiobooks are a great resource for English and ESL teachers. Students now can listen to literary works in English, not only read them in print. This is great resource especially for learners of English as a Second Language.

LibriVox provides audiobooks from the public domain for students to listen to that are read in English; students can listen to the literature or poetry while also hearing the correct pronunciation.

According to a recent article in the New York Times, Public Domain Books, Ready for Your iPod, “LibriVox volunteers record chapters of books in the public domain and release the audio files back onto the net (via podcast and catalog). Our goal is to make all public domain books available as free audio books. We are a totally volunteer, open source, free content, public domain project.”

Today LibraVox has over 200 recordings of books, poetry and speeches with another 100 in development. Think of the uses of these audio recordings in your English, Literature, ESL or Social Study classes for students in all grades. Now think of the quiet in your classes as your students listen to this new medium – a medium of their generation.

Web Resources

No comments: