Over the holidays I used my own Kindle to help me with the year 13 coursework drafts that have been steadily dribbling in.

I converted them to PDF and emailed them to my Kindle over my home WiFi, so I did not incur any charges. This meant that I could take them with me and annotate them during my travels in the Easter holidays.

When you annotate an item on your Kindle, it will give you a few options, including Save and Share. When I selected this option, I was invited to input my Twitter account details and then my note was tweeted out, directly from the Kindle. When I tweeted a comment about a book I downloaded from Amazon, the tweet contained a link to Amazon, and the link went to a page with both the comment and the excerpt from the book commented on. Obviously that doesn’t work for personal documents but if I arranged with students that they number their paragraphs I could get round that quite easily. A large number of my sixth formers seem to be on Twitter these days; marking would be quicker and more fun this way!

I got the school Kindles out today to charge and was delighted to find that most of them were still almost on full battery, which is marvellous considering it has been nearly two months since we charged them up. Obviously the Kindles where the 3G had been left on were dead, but I had envisaged a long hour in the staffroom, plugging them all in, so I was pleased to see this wasn’t necessary.

One of the ladies in my knitting group showed me her new Kindle today and she has already done a lot with it. As well as using it as a repository for the dozens of knitting patterns she has amassed over the years, she also has podcasts on it to listen to in the evenings while she’s knitting. I’m impressed! And this gives me even more ideas. We have revision podcasts….