(With apologies to my year 11s – here is a post I wrote with them in March and never finished!)

Today I used my History lesson with year 11 to put the revision guide onto the Kindles and begin working with them.

I tweaked the revision guide in Word and then converted it to a Kindle ebook using Mobipocket Creator.

We don’t have any wireless access in the History mobiles, and because emailing the document to the Kindles via 3G would have cost 20p for each Kindle, I manually transferred the revision guide via my laptop. This took quite a long time; I will need to set aside a good half hour to transfer the second revision guide when I complete it.

Some learning points:
– The revision guide works with the text-to-speech function, so it will read to you. Jess K suggested that this could be used for subliminal learning, by listening to it reading to you whilst asleep.
– If, like us, you have checklists and bullet points in your ebook, make sure you put a full stop at the end of each one, or the text-to-speech reads through it without a pause.
– Lots of the students liked to turn the page landscape and found the revision guides easier to work with this way.
– Georgia found that typing takes quite a lot of time and you can only delete a character at a time, instead of holding down delete.
– Ashley discovered YouTube does not work on the experimental browser. I don’t think too many people were shocked by this revelation.

I have also, since this post was written, given the Kindles to my year 12s to use alongside an academic article, full of lengthy and confusing words. They made good use of the dictionary and were very complimentary. One of them, though, wondered who had downloaded a sample of the Kama Sutra onto one of the devices. I am also wondering that. Hard stares all round, year 11!