For all my griping about the black hole of school iPad maintenance, I can’t deny that the instant gratification of eBooks can, at times, be supremely useful. We had a saga recently involving a teacher who was supposed to be doing an activity with an after-school club, but went home sick at lunchtime. Nobody else had her stuff.
The principal, who co-leads the club, had a storybook she was saving for next week. She decided to move that up, but alas, she had the book at home. She approached me just after lunch and asked me if there was ‘anything we could do about that.’
Indeed, there was. They had the book in the Kindle store, and as long as she was willing to pay 14 bucks for it (she was) she could have it. We don’t have the Kindle app installed on the school iPads, and I didn’t have time to download it and set it up, but I downloaded it onto mine since I have a Kindle account already, and just handed it off to her come club-time.
The ebook version was one of those interesting enhanced books I’ve seen a handful of which preserves the print layout but allows you to double-tap on text to zoom in on it. The paragraph jumps out as a little magnified pop-up window for easy reading. The beautiful illustrations looked great on my iPad and I am sure the children enjoyed the story; for myself, I am a little wary of relying too much on this sort of book since limitations always make me a little nervous and this one needs a big-screen device to run properly.
For the current mini-crisis though, it was a win. And since it wasn’t my $14, it’s no skin off my nose to be the big hero who saved the day!
