Sunday, November 24, 2013

The reading corner







Transform your mobile device into an e-book, and read anywhere. With an integrated dictionary and a word-list manager make the best out of your reading sessions without spending any money in other devices.


Picture this: a student needs to read a tale in English. He’ll need the book, a dictionary and a notebook to write down the words he’d previously looked up. Anything more? Sure! A comfortable space, some school stuff (pens, markers…), a lamp and some silence, to say the least.

Can’t we ease things up? Of course yes, through the use of mobile devices. Now picture this other scene: the same student switches on his mobile, runs a reader application, loads a previously downloaded book, and starts reading. 

Everything is on his palm. He goes through the pages, finding words he doesn’t understand. He long-taps on them, and a built-in dictionary pops up to show their meaning and pronounce them. The word is automatically saved in a list, which can be shared with other applications for further review, or can be printed directly from the mobile. The student does all that with just one finger. Anyplace, anytime, with no restrictions.


Now, let’s do some magic in our mobiles to set things up. First of all, download and install these Android based applications:

  1. FBReader and its TTS engine (text to speech): https://play.google.com/store/search?q=fbreader
  2. Colordict and whatever thesaurus you’re interested in: https://play.google.com/store/search?q=colordict

Second, bookmark the following URL: www.gutenberg.org, you’ll need it to freely download books.

And third, let’s get started. Have a look at the following video (remember you can see it in full screen, and pause it for the details). 

Enjoy!