I experienced a couple bumps with the Nooks this week. Nothing major, but it wouldn't be a true pilot if I didn't share the snags alongside the positives.
One of these snags emerged during a simple attempt at humor. We are now well into Lloyd Jones' Mister Pip, a story that takes place on the island of Bougainville during the early 1990's. Due to a war over a copper mine, the mainland government shuts off all power and supplies to the island. While the island citizens struggle under these circumstances, one man on the island decides to run a school, which consists of reading Great Expectations to the children.
My students, of course, ask, "Why Great Expectations?"
I smugly reply, "Well, it's not like they had Nooks. Otherwise the teacher could download other titles." Ha, ha, I thought, and a few appeasing students smiled or chuckled.
Then one young lady said, "Yeah, but they couldn't read it at night. That's why I'm not using the Nook anymore. I can't read it at night. It doesn't have a lit screen like an iPad."
An sure enough, on top of her Nook lay a hard-cover copy of Mister Pip. I explained briefly about the e-ink technology the Nook uses, but told her it was okay for her to use the traditional book. Oh well.
Another minor issue arose when I tried to share excerpts with Twitter, something I mentioned in the previous post. To clarify, it does technically work exactly as it should. What I found, however, is that Twitter's 125-character nature is usually too brief for the passages students want to share, let alone a passage AND a comment in one Tweet.
The Twitter connection is still intriguing to me, so I might end up using it differently than I had originally imagined. Stay tuned.
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