2014-01-29-BookShare

Seminars@Hadley

What’s New at Bookshare?

Presented by

Kristina King Cohen

Lara Rondberg

Moderated by

Larry Muffett

January 29, 2014

Larry Muffett

Welcome to Seminars@Hadley. My name is Larry Muffett. I'm a member of Hadley Seminars Team and I also work at curricular affairs.

Today's seminar topic is What's New at Bookshare? Our presenters today are Christina King Cohen, Senior Education Program Manager and Lara Rondberg, Training Manager at Bookshare. Today Christina and Lara will sharing their insights with you on changes and upgrades to Bookshare. Now, let me welcome both Christina and Lara and turn the microphone over to them. Good afternoon.

Lara Rondberg

Well, I'd just like to say welcome everyone and thank you again for attending the seminar. We're really happy to let you know about some of the latest features here at Bookshare. Before we get into that I'm going to go over just some of the basics for people who might not be as familiar with Bookshare or might be new to Bookshare. So I guess with that we could begin with the first slide.

Great. Okay. So what is Bookshare? It's an online library of accessible educational media for readers with print disabilities, and we'll get into a little more of what is considered a print disability. It's an initiative of Benetech. We're a nonprofit tech company in Silicon Valley where unlike some of you are saying it's cold, it's kind of a balmy spring-like day here today. We have over 268,000 student members, over 10,000 schools and other organizations that participate with us, more than 216,000 titles and every month they're adding about a 1,000 books. So that title list is always growing with both suggestions from our readers and just what our collection team adds into the collection on a regular basis.

Next slide, please. So what Bookshare offers is digital books for individuals with print disabilities. The memberships are free for qualified students. We're able to make the service free through an award from OSEP. We also offer free assistive technology software to our members. And the books are on the website is 24/7 access to the books. Next slide.

Before I get into the different membership options I wanted to talk a little bit about who's eligible for Bookshare. It's based on having a print disability. That can be a visual impairment, low vision, blindness, a physical disability such as cerebral palsy or muscular dystrophy, something that prevents a person from being able to hold a book and turn the pages, or a learning disability, reading disability, dyslexia, these are considered print disabilities and with the copyright laws that's how we're able to make this material available. So it's not based on disabilities that some students might have listed in their IEP.

And the disabilities are verified by a competent authority, and that can be a doctor, a teacher, occupational therapist, physical therapist, someone who has intimate knowledge of the child's, student's disability, and that's a form that is submitted verifying the proof of disability.

So there's two membership options, organizational memberships and individual. The organizational memberships that would be a school, it can be a public or private school, college, university, those are the school signs up for an account and then downloads the book on behalf of the students. It can also be you know rehab agencies, resource centers, libraries, other centers that serve students, and it's free. The teacher or the school administrator creates the account and downloads the material for the students.

An individual membership is for students of any age. It's free for those who are eligible. Nonstudents can also sign up at $50.00 a year with a one-time $25.00 signup fee. If the student is under 18 the parent creates the account for them. If they're 18 or over they can create it themselves. And they can go and download the books directly themselves. And this is a really great benefit to have even if the student also has a membership through their school if they have their individual membership they can download book at home whenever they want. They can download the free assistive technology tools that we provide. They are able to use the web reader which we'll get to a little bit later. That's one of the newer functions that we have. And also many students now are using mobile devices such as iPads or iPhones or tablets. They can download the apps for those and read whatever they like. So that's something we really think is a great option to have both the organizational membership and the individual membership. Next slide please.

And again, here is just another slide. It outlines the two different type of membership options. Again, the individual membership, access Bookshare at home, the student can download the materials for themselves. They can download all books except for textbooks. They still would need the teacher to download the textbook. And with the organizational membership they can access Bookshare at school. The teacher downloads on behalf of the student and can download all books including any textbooks that they might be using in the class. Next slide.

Okay. Now I'm going to turn it over to Christina who is going to give an overview of what's new at Bookshare.

Kristina King Cohen

Great. Thank you Lara. So that was basically a review of what Bookshare is, what we can offer you, either if you're an eligible student or an eligible nonstudent there are membership options. So again, there are the free membership options for any of those students with print disabilities, and for those schools working with those students. But then there are also the membership options for eligible nonstudents. And again, that's $50.00 a year with a one-time $25.00 registration fee. And what that gets you is access to the Bookshare Library, which is again is over 200,000 books. We're actually the world's largest accessible library and we are adding thousands of books every month. It also gets you access to some free technology. So before I get into what's new and if you're not familiar with Bookshare we do offer some free technology, some free reader software, it's called the Read Out Loud Bookshare Edition. We also offer a free android app which is called Go Read, and you can find information about Go Read at GoRead.org.

And of course, if you're wanting more information about the free reader technology, you can always go to Bookshare.org and look under Getting Started Reading Tools. So again, Bookshare.org Getting Started Reading Tools. And that's for more information about our free reader technology.

For those of you using IOS devices, so the iPad, iPhone and iPod, we have an IOS app called Read2Go. You can find information about it at Read2Go.org and that's $19.99 okay for that app. And you just buy that through the Apple App Store.

So we're offering you access to the books, different membership options, all of our books are accessible, they're in the DAISY format, mp3 format, and also braille. And so again, we're offering you the membership options and those are a free membership for qualified students and their schools, thanks to the support of the U.S. Department of Ed, and then there are the membership options for qualified people for $50.00 a year with a one-time $25.00 registration fee. So those are really the two types of memberships. And you can find that again by going to Bookshare.org and the category is Getting Started Membership. Yeah. So when you go to Bookshare.org there is some categories on the top of the home page and there's a membership page where you can get all the qualifying information and the different membership options. Okay. So that's a little bit of background. So again, the membership options, the books that we offer and the free technology.

And when you go to Bookshare.org you can either look up a book by title or author or subject in a simple search field, which is also at the top of the home page, or you can browse our collections, or you can do an advanced search. So again, we have over 200,000 books to choose from. We have thousands of textbooks. We have all the variety of New York Times Bestsellers, Oprah's Book List, any of the popular books that are out there, and again books for K-12, university and beyond. So lots to choose from. Okay. So that's a little bit of background for those of you who are not familiar with Bookshare.

Now for some of you on the line who are familiar with Bookshare we have a lot of new things that we've been working on that we introduced this past fall. And I will answer, I'm seeing some chat questions come through and I will answer those in a moment. So what I'm going to talk about, some of the new things, number one we just launched, or not just, it was last spring. We launched a cloud-based reader. It's called Web Reader and it gives you the ability to go to Bookshare.org, open a book and immediately have it come up in an online reader. So I'll tell you a little bit more about what that is and try to describe it. And I'm reading through a slide right now.

We've also made some updates to how organizations manage their accounts online, and also how individuals can sign up online. We have also made some updates to our Read2Go app. This is our IOS app, and essentially it offers you the ability to now read our books with images. And I also highlight some of our new books. We have lots more books in Spanish, and we have a new process for requesting books. And then I'll tell you a little bit more about a new feature called Reading Lists and some of our new training materials. Okay.

Before I get into that I think maybe I'll just answer these two chat questions that came in if that's all right. Okay. I'm not seeing any objections to that. Let's see. So there's a teacher in Bermuda, and I'm assuming you're working with students non-U.S. students in Bermuda. If that is the case, you can go to Bookshare.org and look at International Memberships, and that is under our Memberships page. We do have people around the world who are members of Bookshare. Unfortunately it will not be free for your students because again, that award from the U.S. Department of Ed just supports students here in the U.S. But there are international membership options and I would again I'd take a look at our website and you can most certainly sign up your qualified students.

The other thing to note is again, we have over 200,000 books. Not all of them have global copyright. A majority of our books unfortunately just have U.S. Copyright, but we do have thousands of books that also have global copyright. So you'll have to also look for those, and there is a way to search for that in our advanced search function. Okay. So let's see.

So a question about Read2Go with refreshable braille devices. I'm not very familiar with the pairing of that app with a refreshable braille device, so at the end of this webinar we'll be sharing our contact information. You can certainly email me and I will connect you with our support team and we can get you some updates on that.

So Read2Go, yes, although it sounds like some people are experimenting with Read2Go on different devices, but as far as I know it is optimized for IOS devices, iPad, iPhone, and iPod.

Okay. Super. Great questions. All right. Let's move to the next slide please.

So Bookshare Web Reader. This is a cloud-based reader. You don't need to install any software. You don't need to buy an app, etc. This is our way of offering people just another way to read our accessible books. It only works for individual members, so that's why it's important for you as a qualified reader to get your membership, or if you're working with qualified students to get them their own memberships. You don't need to do any downloading. You just basically go to our website, find a book, select Read Now, and it will open up in Web Reader.

The thing to note about Web Reader is that it's optimized for Google Chrome. Okay. It will work on web browsers like Internet Explorer, Firefox or Safari, but you will not have all the accessibility features of Google Chrome. So when you're interested in using Web Reader I highly recommend that you go to Google Chrome, you go to Bookshare, you log in, you find your book, you select Read Now and the book will open up in the Web Reader. It offers text to speech and word highlighting. You can also adjust the size of font I think up to 70 point and adjust the background color, etc. Depending on your needs there is some nice functionality.

If you don't necessarily need the text to speech technology or the word highlighting you can use like I said, Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, and you'll need to use a screen reader to be able to read the words out loud and of course it won't offer the highlighting. Okay. So that's Bookshare Web Reader. That is a free tool to all those individual numbers. And again, optimize for Google Chrome.

All right. I'm seeing some nice questions come in. That's great. So next slide is the updates for organizational sponsors. So again, if you are a school and you're working with qualified students we're making it easier for you to manage your online roster. So you can now set student's book download preferences, whatever file format they need, you can add and remove students from your roster, from your quick list which is a way to quickly download for multiple students. You can add students to reading lists, you can organize books for students and share those reading lists with students. And you can also now if a student already has an individual membership you can easily link them to your organizational membership.

So again, if you're representing a school working with qualified students this is going to pertain to you. If not, most of this information won't be that helpful. But anyway, what is important about this too is again, it's making management of your roster much easier, but it's also giving you the ability to share books with your students and also share textbooks whereas they might not be able to access those on their own. Okay. So it's just making your Bookshare experience easier. All right. Next slide please.

So with students needing to get their individual memberships, you the educator can actually make this happen much easier. You can now do all this online, end the information to a parent online, and they'll be able to get the information, print out the form, sign it and return it to us. Pretty soon we're going to be offering E-signature. So it's going to make the process even easier. So now it'll be all online. A parent will get the information online, they'll find it online and return it to us.

The other wonderful thing about this improvement is that individual members will be able to create their password upon sign up. They don't need to wait for a welcome email from us. So it's just instant, again instant access to Bookshare. All right. So these are primarily improvements for those of you who are educators working with your students. All right. Next slide.

Okay. So Read2Go which is the IOS app. Before, about six months ago you wouldn't be able to look at our books with images without transferring the books through iTunes. Okay. Now you don't need to do that, but what you do need to do is go to the app store and definitely update your Read2Go. Update it to the most recent version and that will give you the ability to download books with images.

For specific step-by-step instructions, and this is also on the slide here, there is a link on our support center that again gives you step-by-step instructions for how to make the update on Read2Go and then how to download those books with images. And that you'll find when you go to Bookshare.org and you go to Help, Support Center, and if you search by Read2Go Books with Images you'll get information. So again, that's Bookshare.org, Help, Support Center, and then search Read2Go Books with Images. All right. Next slide please.

So another fabulous thing to highlight is we do have thousands of new books, and actually one resources gives us access to millions of books. Internet Archive, they are an organization actually based in San Francisco and they primarily focus on out of copyright books, so some of the more classics, but what they have is basically a repository of three million DAISY titles. So these are books in the DAISY font format, the accessible DAISY. So now from Bookshare if you go to Advanced Search and you search by Internet Archive this will give you access to three million accessible books. So I would definitely check that out, again if you're interested in the classics you'll probably find all of them either through Bookshare or Internet Archive. And again, this is all free for those qualified students and for those qualified individual nonstudents it's $50.00 a year.