Books on Nooks to go to NLR high schoolers

Emma Santoy (left), an employee with Barnes & Noble, helps Suzzette Patterson use a Nook ereader.
Emma Santoy (left), an employee with Barnes & Noble, helps Suzzette Patterson use a Nook ereader.

— Hundreds of books — 600-plus fiction and nonfiction and maybe a few textbooks — will be distributed later this school year to each 10th- and 11th-grader at North Little Rock High School.

The students won’t have to wheel their new, not-solittle personal libraries home on dollies.

Instead, the books will be loaded onto lightweight electronic reading devices, or e-readers, purchased by the North Little Rock School District with a two-year, $722,000 federal grant.

North Little Rock is the only district in Arkansas to get the grant, which also went to school districts in places like Cleveland; Camden, N.J.; Kansas City and St. Louis, Mo.; Houston; Milwaukee; and Starkville, Miss.

North Little Rock High School media specialists Macy Purtle and Valerie McLean applied last summer for the U.S. Department of Education’s Innovative Approaches to Literacy grant so they could purchase Barnes & Noble-brand Nook e-readers for as many as 2,100 students in 10th, 11th and 12th grades.

The two learned Sept. 28 that their application for their “Book Nook Project” was approved.

“The Nooks are for students to keep as long as they attend North Little Rock High School,” Purtle said recently. “When students graduate, they will return them, but until that time they will be able to use the Nooks at school and at home and keep them over the summer.”

The devices were initially planned to be Nook Tablets but may end up being the newer Nook HDs. Plans call for the reading devices to be distributed during the second semester of this school year, possibly in February. Students who will be 10th-graders next year will receive the devices early in the 2013-14 school year.

By making a wide range of books easily accessible seven days a week 24 hours a day, Purtle and McLean said, student literacy skills will improve in a district where one in every three high school juniors scored below grade level on the state’s 11th-grade literacy exam last spring.

The grant application was presented as a way to build on existing efforts, the teachers said.

North Little Rock High School long ago instituted a 10-minute reading period at the beginning of each of the four daily class periods as a way to reinforce literacy. The school more recently began offering a reading course for students who need to strengthen their literacy skills.

The e-reader is the latest spin on getting students to read.

“We had tried distribution of books in the past,” Purtle said. “We had a summer bagof-books program and classroom libraries. It was difficult to keep up with the books and get them back.”

The 16-gigabyte reading devices will be loaded with hundreds of age-appropriate fiction and nonfiction electronic books from Barnes & Noble’s collection, as well as electronic books purchased with some of the federal grant money and with money from the North Little Rock High School budget.

The grant also will be used to provide subscriptions to other electronic book sources such as Tumblebooks and Overdrive.

Students will be able to add new books to their devices at school or even at community sites within their neighborhoods in the summer if they do not have access to Wi-Fi in their homes.

Purtle said the research into similar but smaller ereader projects showed that reluctant readers in general, and boys in particular, respond well to e-readers and that people who use e-readers tend to read a wide range of content.

The devices allow for modifications to facilitate reading, such as enlarged type for visually impaired readers and a text-to-speech option that allows students to hear words pronounced. There are links that take readers to a dictionary by touching a word.

“The main thing is that the students will have access to the books,” McLean said. “But then you start thinking about the other possibilities there are for this Nook that they will have in their hand. We are discovering things right now. We keep saying, ‘Oh, my gosh, we can do this now.’”

Purtle and McLean are working with the 150-member North Little Rock High School faculty to determine just how the e-readers can best be incorporated in the classrooms and integrated into the curriculum.

Brian Brown, principal of North Little Rock High School, said in an e-mail that students are excited about getting the e-readers and the faculty members are “inspired” as they go through the hands-on training with the e-readers.

“The Nook is not only an e-reader, which allows students access to a large volume of free and paid materials, but also a computer with an Internet browser, which allows students access to research any educational topic,” Brown said.

“This grant allows the school to ‘even the playing field’ by giving each student the same access to the same device,” he said, adding that the e-readers also will enable school leaders to begin exploring the use of digital textbooks versus hard-copy versions.

Purtle said she and McLean know there will be breakdowns, damage and loss in regard to the Nooks — that’s what happens to textbooks, too. And textbooks also can cost in excess of $100.

The grant plan includes some accommodation for losses and damage, McLean said. Insurance is likely to be offered to the e-reader users, as well.

And, to minimize the theft and pawning of the devices, the school will work to get the word out that the lost and stolen e-readers, which will be marked with bar codes, can be disabled from a remote location to make them unworkable.

Also, the two school librarians are aware of how quickly technology becomes outdated. Textbooks, too, become outdated and have to be replaced. Typically that happens about every six years in Arkansas.

An outdated device can work well for several years even if it doesn’t have all the latest bells and whistles, Purtle said.

“Anything we can do above providing students with a library in the hand is serendipitous,” McLean said.

The North Little Rock district is one of 46 recipients of the Innovative Approaches to Literacy grants. The grants are meant to help improve reading achievement in younger students and motivate older children to read.

The two-year grants that are going to awardees in 21 states are specifically for districts and schools in which at least 25 percent of students are from low-income families.

Besides school districts, other recipients were nonschool organizations such as Reading Is Fundamental Inc., the Children’s Defense Fund and the Boys & Girls Clubs of America.

McLean and Purtle anticipate that North Little Rock’s Book Nook Project will create a ripple effect in their community.

“When we were writing the grant, we decided we wanted the Nook for every student,” McLean said, “and then we realized they will have the Nooks at home so they can have books on there for their younger brothers and sisters, and then we realized their parents can use it, too. The circle kept getting wider and wider.”

Front Section, Pages 1 on 11/24/2012

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