I believe we are recording
Okay. So welcome to what's new with Bookshare. It's great to be with everyone.
My name is Christine Jones. I'm a senior education program manager with Bookshare and I've been with Bookshare for about
Nine years almost going on, nine years now so I'm excited to be able to tell you more about our new features we've been working hard this summer to make Bookshare even better.
Especially for educators. We've got lots of great functions and features to show you
So I'm just going to do a quick introduction of Bookshare for those who might be brand new couple of you indicated that you were brand new to Bookshare.
So just a quick introduction Bookshare is an E book library that makes reading easier. People with reading barriers such as dyslexia, blindness
and physical disabilities can read in ways that work for them and books, you're really allows members to customize the reading experience so that they can
Pick the reading tool that they like with the voice that they like with the color scheme that they like with the pace.
Of the reading that they like with the spacing that they like so they can really make it work for them.
They can read in a lot of different ways and on many different devices Bookshare currently has 656,000 titles in the collection and we're adding now about 5000 titles, a month. They include textbooks books for both the sign and let and leisure reading
How to books and periodicals and the memberships are free for all qualified us students of any age.
Because of funding from the US Department of Ed Office of Special Education Programs there are a lot of free ways to read books books, and also many commonly available reading options.
Anyone can use Bookshare who has been certified by a competent authority as having a qualifying condition that basically makes it difficult or impossible for them to read or process printed text.
Some examples are learning a learning disability, such as dyslexia low vision or blindness or physical disability.
Those who have a Learning Ally membership can automatically qualify for Bookshare with cross qualification agreement with Learning Ally.
So we definitely encourage you to sign up all of the students in your school or district to qualify and help them learn how to use this resource.
There are two types of Bookshare accounts. Organizational accounts where teachers, which the system calls sponsors add the qualified students who are called members and provide logins, assign books via reading lists
and then the students login, find books shared with them and read. Then there is an individual membership that students can have in addition to their school account.
And that is where they can either sign up separately or they can sign up through the school. Then they log in, they search for books and read. So there's a lot more independence in the individual account. So we do recommend that for students when they're ready but
There are ways that the teachers don't have as much visibility into what they're doing as well. So we sort of suggests that
You wait to give them the full on individual membership until the students are pretty comfortable with Bookshare and we can certainly answer more questions or answer questions about that and get into that in greater depth if that would be of interest.
Educators generally just create accounts in Bookshare or get added to accounts.
Then login, add their students. Subscribe to or copy already made reading lists.
create custom reading lists and then request any new books that they might need that are not yet in Bookshare and students login look at their reading lists, select a book and read
So today I really wanted to focus on some new features that we worked hard on in the past few months, a section called educators get started, which will lead us then to our reading tools wizard that helps you select the right reading tool for each student
And that tool actually has a page for each of a number of different reading tools that includes, in most cases, a video a short video that shows you how to use that tool.
And then we've updated our training and resources library, we've added a student dashboard and you can see the student reading activity.
And then it's now possible to browse Special Collections by Lexile level I know that that is of great interest to many educators, so I'm going to run through some of these new features. So what I'm going to do is go ahead and share my websites.
And I'm going to go to the educators get started pages. But first, let me show you how I got here. So I'll go back to the Bookshare homepage. And then if you scroll down so you are at Bookshare.org and if you scroll down, there's a section called Educators Get Started guide.
So you'll see that it starts out with the signup process. So this is how to create a new account then takes you to the website for creating an organization account.
Then you can set the primary contact. Agree to Terms download and complete the organization agreement, but most of you, it looks like have completed this already, because you're already using Bookshare so you can basically skip this page and go on to the next page, page two.
And here you can
And this is going to guide you through the process of adding students student members to your roster. So we encourage you to just follow these instructions to add new students, you can add them one at a time. Or you can also add
Add members in bulk. And we have a How To guide here, you'll see for how to add 15 or more members. So take advantage of that if you want to add a group of students all at one time.
And then you can assign books to the students as you add them, this guide actually walks you through the process of doing
The assigning books and in a little bit more detail later. So we suggest at this point that you not do that option, although certainly if you know how to do it, you know, feel free to do that. But then we show you how to add other teachers to the account, which we call sponsors.
Adding those and then the next page is all about the assigning books to students and to do that, we have a mechanism called reading lists.
So students get access to books that have been shared with them by their teacher on reading lists and you can create your own reading list you can create a reading list by topic by grade level you can create a reading list
For a particular student and share that with him or her, and then the students access their reading lists and open their books.
And so you can create your own reading list or you can subscribe to one of many reading list Bookshare has created and pushed out and made available and I can walk through that. For those of you who may be new to that.
So you create a reading list here, this, this is the process here of creating a new reading list and walking through that.
There are some great resources links to on this page. So the How To guide for using reading lists at the very top of the page. This is a step by step guide that
walks you through that process of creating or subscribing to reading lists. And then at the bottom of the page here. There's another great help.
A video on how to use Bookshares Reading Lists. So we have both a written how to guide and as well as a video, so please check those out. If you're new to the area of reading lists and Bookshare
And then here. Here is the reading tools wizard. I'm going to get into next but I just want to show you the last page of the educators get started section is really where
Students read the books and showing them how they log in and in this case specifically how they log in, they see their
reading lists, they can go to the tab that says my reading lists and they see their lists, they select a list.
And then they see a list of books and they always see this button here that says read now, which is how they can open the book in Bookshare web reader, which is a free tool that is available for every student and it's available whenever students have internet access.
It does work best on Google Chrome or Safari or Firefox. So we recommend that that's used on one of those three browsers, but then students can basically login find their book, open it in the Bookshare web reader.
And then this walks them through how exactly to open the book.
They would actually go to the table of contents.
Here and then then start the book reading and Bookshare web reader has
Has its own reader that reads the texts out loud and highlights the words.
So there's a lot more to learn here. There are some how to guides about how students read books. How to guides about Bookshare web reader and a video about reading with Bookshare web reader. So lots of great resources that we've built in.
I'm going to go back now to the previous page so that I can show you the reading tools wizard.
So I'm going to show you where it is here, but I'm also going to show you how to access the reading tools Wizard from the homepage. So I'm going to select it here.
But let me also show you if you're on Bookshare homepage.
And you scroll down and you see this tout here that says find a reading tool you can select that. So either way, you get to this page.
That walks you through what you know, starting with questions like what kind of device. Do you want to use to read your books. Are you going to be using a computer.
Or a laptop or using a tablet or smartphone or using an assistive technology device. So if we select computer or laptop. Then it asked, well, what kind of device are you using are you using a Windows PC, Mac, or a Chromebook. And if we select Chromebook, for example.
It provides a couple of options here for reading Bookshare books on Chromebooks.
And if we select either of these options then were taken to a page with some detailed instructions and as you'll see here a very short video about how to read Bookshare books in this particular tool.
go back, we see the same thing for the Capti voice option here. This is a video showing how to read books in the Capti voice online tool.
So I will say that this particular wizard doesn't include all of the ways to read Bookshare book, what we've done is we've selected what we think are the best options. The easiest and most beneficial options for you. There are definitely other tools that that you can learn about over
You know in our website that read Bookshare books, but we think these are are the best ones to recommend at any point you can go back in the tool or you can start the process over again.
So if we started over again with let's say we've got a student reading on an ipad they go to tablet and they might go to IOS for iphone or ipad
And here are some great options for them to read on an iphone or an ipad and it gives you not only basic information, but a link to the
The how to page for that particular tool. So how do I install and use Voice Dream reader. And then here's a video.
For that particular tool that shows how to use it. So we've really tried to make this process simpler in terms of determining how students will read Bookshare books, and some of the different functions and features of these various tools.
See, I'm going to pause to see if there any questions that we want to take up as a group for
They were probably came in and you want me to do. So there was a question can students belonging to an organization create you're their own Reading Lists.
Great, great question. So can students on an organizational account create their own reading lists. And the answer to that is no, they cannot they can
Only access reading lists that have been shared with them by their teacher, but a student who has a full individual membership in Bookshare
Can create their own reading lists and that's another reason why we definitely suggest that they get that level of independence, but only when they're comfortable with it and know how to login or how to reset their password if they forget it.
Let's see. Let me just, I want to show you one quick thing about how a
Student can get a full individual membership and Bookshare, since we're on that topic. And this, I'm going to actually log in as a student.
Got a few students fake students that I have added to my account for demonstration purposes. I'm going to go ahead and login as one of them.
And show you an easy way to get students setup with an individual membership. So once the student is logged in to their account that the teacher setup for them over in the left side of the page, there's a link here that says upgrade to an individual membership.
So this is again logged in as the student and then when they select sign up
Then here this form will be pre populated with information that's pulled from the school account. So the students name, the organization name.
You know, the city, the state, etc. But here is where we recommend that you do this either with a parent or guardian on the phone, or you've already gotten this information and approval from the parent ahead of time.
Or the student can do this at home with the parent, you know, in conjunction with their parents. So this is where you enter or they enter the parents or guardians first name, last name, email and phone
And address if there's a different address
And then they create a username and password and here the username does need to be an actual working email address so that can be
Either the students email address if they have one or it can be the parents email address.
So an email address is entered, and then a new password is created. And if you're doing this in conjunction with your student with the parents permission.
My suggestion would be that you jot this information down somewhere this username and password. Because after this point, you will not have access. You will not be able to see their username and password that they access that they use to login to Bookshare
But the benefit of this, as I said, is that then they can create their own reading lists they can
They can, you know, find books that they like and open them without having to go through their teacher. So we definitely recommend this step.
So I'll take you back into my teacher account and I can show you how you can know which of your students have completed that individual membership process that I just showed you, or a similar process.
Whereby they become individual members in addition to having their school account. So I'm logged into my demonstration teacher account now. And if I go to Members.
Under
Let's see under
Under username. So you can see here that like this student has both and organizational and an individual membership in Bookshare
And that's why under username. It says private. I don't see their username or and I don't have access to their password.
But the rest of the students besides, I just have to on my fake accounts that have connected individual membership and the rest just have their the log into the school account.
But that's how you can tell if that's been completed.
Okay. So jumping back to some of the new features. So I showed you the Educators Get Started guide and the reading tools wizard, as well as the
The reading tool, the videos that show you how to read those. I wanted to show you, while I'm in my teacher account. I wanted to show you one relatively new feature regarding student activity.
Being able to monitor what students are doing. So you've let's say you've logged in, you've added these students, you've created reading lists than assign books to them.
And now you want to see if they're actually reading. If you select any student in your roster you select the last name. Again, this is a fake student in my account.
But it brings up a nice dashboard regarding the students. So you see the students information here, their grade level their type of disability.
Their username and then and you have the ability to reset their password if they're still just on your school account, they don't have that individual account, but then you can see here the list of the books that they've downloaded.
What the title and author of the book was in what format they downloaded it in, and on what date they downloaded it
These downloads and the epub format are likely to have been books they were reading in iBooks, either on the Mac computer or on an ipad because that's the format for iBooks.
So they've read this student has opened books on their ipad they've opened books and maybe in another app that used the daisy text format.
And see if it, if it was Bookshare web reader, you would see that as well. You would see web reader, they had read books in Bookshare web reader.
And you can also see to what reading lists you've assigned this student. This is my demonstration student I use a lot. So, this particular student is assigned to 34 reading lists.
But most of your students wouldn't have this many, but you can see here the reading list they're assigned to you can actually sort those by the name of the list.
And then you can also determine, you know, the number of titles that are on that list.
And then you can also remove students from particular reading lists here as well, just by selecting this little icon next to the name. So I just removed.
The student from one of those reading lists, one of those 34. So now you can see that they are only assigned to 33 reading less rather than 34
So that is how to see the student information, see what they're doing when they downloaded books and
And in what format on what platform. You can get a lot of insight into what they're doing or not doing in their books, your account.
Let's see. I'm going to quickly look at my list of the things I wanted to make sure to share
Alright, the training and resources library and then the Lexile level. Those are the other two things I wanted to share. So let me go ahead and bring you to
Back to the Bookshare website.
So I'm going to go back to the Bookshare homepage.
To so that show you how to access this this. So if you go to help center.
The drop down there and then training and resources.
And then to training resources. This out here that orange box that says training resources.
We've reorganized all of our resources into one page that is organized by topic. So rather than we used to have a page of videos and a page of other content such as how to guides we've merged them now. So on this page, you'll find
Both videos and how to guides on topics variety of topics. So, for example, All About Bookshare this includes two videos as well as a Bookshare flyer
Then under setting up and getting started, you'll have both the option of printed guides, as well as videos.
On that part of the process on things like specific tasks such as a asssigning books and adding members and assigning books.
And then under the read books section here are all these videos that show how to read a Bookshare books on various devices and platforms so
A couple different videos just on books, Bookshare web reader by itself and then Bookshare Web Reader with Snap and Read, which is a Chrome extension that adds more functionality to Bookshare Web reader as is Read and Write.
Read and Write for Google Chrome. So, how to read books share with these different tools, how to read Bookshare books in ibooks on IOS devices. We will soon have one for ibooks on the Mac as well.
Capti voice on a computer, Capti voice on IOS devices. Voice Dream reader and dolphin easy reader. So we've created some new videos.
On how to read Bookshare books on all these different tools and devices. We definitely encourage you to take advantage of those
And keep checking back to this page as well because we'll be adding new content, the content to this page on a regular basis.
And just to remind you how we got here. So we went to help center. So either the drop down or you can actually just click on Help Center and you get to training and resources.
And then once you're there.
Either so if you clicked on the Help Center
The full button here. Then you you're going to go to training resources and training center and then training resources.
You want to end up at that orange training resources box. And that is what's going to get you to this page. So you might
Go there and then bookmark the page for future reference so that you can have it handy and
And if there are, how to guides and tutorials missing from here that you would like. Please feel free to let us know and we can add, you know, get those created and add those as well. But we'll definitely be adding many more of those. We recommend that you check those out.
Then I'm going to show you where to find the lists that are grouped by Lexile level. So I'm on Bookshares website and I'm going to select this browse link at the very top of the page underneath the login box.
And
This is where you'll find
A lot of the great reading lists that Bookshare has created and is making available to you to add to your collection so that you can share them with students. So, for example, New York Times children's best sellers.
Let's see.
True Crime books. Then if you. I'm just going to digress for a minute before I get to the Lexile level, just to show you. So under popular series.
There are a number of other great lists here that we've already curated so you don't have to go through the trouble of doing that. So if students are interested in these you can just bring them into your account.
By subscribing to them and I'll show you in a minute how to do that. And then you can just share these with students. So you'll see here the full collection of the diary of a Wimpy Kid books. The magic tree house series A Series of Unfortunate Events.
The 39 clues, the Dork Diaries goose bumps Arthur's adventures flat Stanley Jeannie be Jones here Heroes of Olympus. So lots of great collections to share with your students to really encourage them.
To read for pleasure and not just for school and just to quickly show you how you would access these less or make them available to your students, you want to first subscribe to the list. And I'll just pick one.
Let's see. I think I don't have Horrible Harry yet and my
Teacher account. So I'm going to select that list at the top. I see this little button that looks kind of like a Wi Fi signal. It's actually an like an RSS feed button. So I'm going to click subscribe
And that brings it into my collection and a prompts me here to go ahead and add members.
To the, to the list. So I can already determine which students. I want to share this list with and I'll go ahead and select all of my students, since this particular one might be of interest to all of them. So it says add selected members.
And so now I can see that I have seven of my students assigned to this list. And so when any of these students login to their school provided Bookshared account, they're going to see
Those that this list this horrible Harry series that they can access and an open the books in whatever tool. They want to open them that open them in
So that is how to subscribe to a reading list. But if I go back to the Browse page again. The main browse page and I scroll down here to for teachers.
And I select that. This is where you'll find the Lexile level classification. So you'll have, first of all,
They're grouped by Lexile level. So here's a list of books in the Lexile level 100 to 190 200 to 290 300 to 390 cetera, all the way down to
1200 level 1200 and up so you can bring any of these lists into your into your account by subscribing to them and then you'll have access to them to share them with students.
There's also there are also some level readers here from Fountos and Pinnell.
And some other great list that you might be interested in. And again you subscribe to these and bring them into your account and then share them with students. Here's a collection of books in Spanish that might be of interest to you for some of your students.
So lots of great list to choose from.
And I showed you the Lexile level. So those are so basically the way we got there was in the Browse page.
And then scrolling down to this, the red box that says for teachers, and this is where you'll see these different Lexile list so that you can bring these into your Bookshare collection and share them with students.
Now let's say that you look at some of these lists and you think. So for example, let's say, The New York Times bestsellers for children list, you know, you think, well, this is a great list.
But it is it's got a lot of titles. It's got 166 titles on it, which is a lot of books and maybe that will overwhelm some of your students if you shared that entire list with them.
And in addition, maybe some of these are not really the right grade level or not really the right you know content.
For your students. So maybe you want to modify this list. So you like this New York Times bestsellers.
For children list. Overall, but you'd like to modify it, but you can do is make a copy of the list. So, up at the top where the subscribe button as you can choose to copy that instead
Or, in addition to subscribing to it. You can copy it. You can call it, it'll automatically default to being called copy you could call it, you know. Teacher copy or whatever.
Whatever you want to name it and then you can actually delete titles from it. If you'd like to do that, you then get access to the list.
And I should mention
You can only subscribe to or copy these reading less when you're you're logged into your teacher your organization account. As you can see at the top, I'm logged in as a as a teacher.
So here's this list that I just made a copy of it's my copy. So what I want to do is, you know, I can already see that some of these books are not the right grade level. So I can just remove just use the button on the far right, and I can remove books from the reading list.
So I can maybe pare it down to just the ones that I think are going to be of interest to my students
So those are some very helpful features.
And let's see if I've gone through everything talked about the student dashboard. The Special Collections. Yeah, I think that some. Those are the, the new features that we've added
And then
When I can make sure to walk through with you now a sort of next steps. Let me go back here.
So the next steps for educators
If you haven't already done so, to create an account and you can start with the Educators Get Started guide that I showed you on the Bookshare homepage.
And then if you've already created an account to skip the first page, go to the second page to learn about adding students and setting up Reading Lists and adding other teachers.
So add students assign books and then the students are going to log in and read at that point.
We have a lot of great available help. And actually, let me just show you a couple of resources that you will find helpful. Let me go back to the Bookshare website. So always the Help Center is a great resource. This is where you can
Put in a term to find questions pertaining to a topic that you're interested in. I go to help center. First of all, you see some hot topics. These tend to be the
The subjects, about which our support team gets calls the most frequently. So you'll see some of some hot topics there. You'll also see some
general categories such as reading tools managing your account general information about Bookshare and how to resolve certain issues, but you can also type something in the Help Center here to learn more about any particular topic and you'll get some great
Some great help there. I should also mention that you can search the entire Bookshare sites if you're trying to remember you know where something was on the page. So, for example,
I might search for the term wizard.
Because I can't remember how to find the reading tools wizard. So there it is right there.
So use that site search site search box. If you're trying to remember how to find something on the Bookshare site. Another great resource that I want to show you is going to always be down in the bottom of the Help Center page so on Help Center.
Here's ask the community.
So this is a forum that where users are have posted questions and then other users answer them. But we also have our team monitor this and answer questions as well. So there are
several categories. And we've already set up so general discussion feature suggestions. So if you have
Features you'd like us to add to Bookshare this would be great place to post it and other teachers can comment on your suggestions.
Or if you need help with Bookshare. Here's a great place to start. And you can scroll through this, because this may already have the answer to some of your questions. So you can see here questions that have already been posted. You can scroll through them or you can search
Up here for a particular topic. Let's say you want to learn what NIMAC is. NIMAC is a repository of textbooks, you can get find some great
Questions that have already been posted and the answers here. So we definitely recommend that you make good use of the Bookshare forum and as I said you can access the form from the bottom of the Help Center pages. So we go back to Bookshare
The show you again how to get there.
So if you're on Bookshare share go to help center and at the bottom, you see, ask the community. So definitely take advantage of that. It's so great resource with lots of information by people who've already had the same questions that you might be encountering
Okay, so that's the main gist of the content that I wanted to go through today. So this is a great time to pause for questions there other questions that have come up that
We can tackle as a group.
Together and this is Mario, my colleague who is helping out today. So thanks, Mario. Yeah, absolutely. Um, so a lot of great question. Here's one that came before it sounds like there's some newer Bookshare educators coming onto accounts
already created.
And they don't have access to their usernames and passwords of these of the students. So any tips we can give those teachers. Great question. So if you've inherited or you've been added to an existing Bookshare account
On you're wondering about the username or password of students. So you're talking about their
Their Student Accounts. That's actually pretty easy to see if you go to
See
I'm going to be logged in here.
Logged into my teacher accounts. I'm going to go to my Bookshare. I'm going to go to my members lists to show you the student list. So you'll see here where the students usernames are located and you can you can see their username here.
And then if you need if they don't remember their password if you select their last name.
You'll get a link here where you can reset the password. So just work with the student, but this is the username that they use to login
And then you reset the password here. It's just going to basically bring open a dialogue box and you just type in a new password here and just make sure the student knows what their new password is.
But if the student has a full individual membership in Bookshare this is what I was saying earlier, is it's
For example, my two students here who have both an organization and an individual membership and books here. I don't have visibility into their username and you as a teacher, you can't see that.
That's something between them and their parents or whoever was involved in the process of helping them get that individual account.
It's always going to be an email address so they can remember the email address that they used when they created the account
The username will always be an email address. Let me log out and I'll show you how they can reset this and this is true for any teachers if teachers.
Have been added to an account, but don't remember their, their password. So they go here to the login box and underneath it says, For Forgot your password and they enter the email address that they use when they
Signed up or when they were added to a Bookshare account. So if it's a teacher, they can enter their email address here and they get an opportunity to reset their password
via the link that's the comes in an email to them or if it's a student who's gotten a full individual membership their username is an email address so they can answer that email address here.
And click Reset. Reset Password. They'll get an email with instructions for resetting their passwords. If they don't remember their email address their username, then they're going to unfortunately have to contact Bookshare to be able to get that information.
And they can do that at in the Help Center down at the bottom. In addition to the Ask the community there's, you can either email Bookshare, or you can call during our business hours to get that question answered, very good question. Great. Here's another one on reading tools.
Does Kurzweil work with Bookshare. Yes. Great question. Yes. Kurzweil works with Bookshare and we definitely
think that many students are using that we have some information in the Bookshare website on Kurzweil, I'm going to bring that up right now.
So here's some if I just went into the Help Center and put Kurzweil in here are some FAQ on
How do I open books and Kurzweil Firefly, how do I download an open books using Kurzweil so
Definitely make use of that tool. It does integrate directly with Bookshare and allows students to log into their Bookshare account right in the tool, as do many of the tools that work with Bookshare so definitely recommend checking that one out.
Here is a book related question specifically book format. What is DAISY.
That's a great question as well.
Let me
Let me log into my teacher account. And so I can show you what some of these format options are Daisy stands for a digital accessible information system and it's an HTML like format, but it has a lot more accessibility built in. So it allows for things like tabbing between
Between not only pages, but maybe between paragraphs are between sentences in a page.
Allows for things like searching the text for a particular word. There's a lot of great features that are built into Daisy.
Most of the tools that most of the people who need Daisy know that they need the daisy format. So if they're using a tool that reads books and Daisy format, they tend to know that already. And so when they are accessing a book. So let's say I'm going to go to
Let's say I'm just got to look for Harry Potter book.
And if I know I want to us if I'm going to assign it to a student. The best thing to do is just add it to their reading list.
And let me quickly.
Just filter this for only the English ones. Okay, so here is, for example, a Harry Potter book Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. So I am as a teacher. I have a couple of options. I can add it to a reading list.
And then the student can then login if that reading list has been shared with them. They can log in and access this book. I'm going to go ahead and add it to this eighth grade social studies
Reading list. And as long as my student has been assigned to that reading list. They can log in and access it that way.
Or you can always download it for a student and this is where you're going to have those options of Daisy.
Either text only or if the if the book has images, you'll see Daisy text with images. This one apparently doesn't have images available in it.
But you select the student for whom you're downloading and you're downloading that Daisy text file.
And as I said, Most educators and students who need the daisy text know that they need the daisy text or Daisy with images they know they need the daisy format.
For their particular device, but I would say for most of your students, you don't really need to worry about a download format because either
They're going to open up books in Bookshare web reader or they're going to they're going to access the Bookshare book in an app.
In which case the app knows what format to download, so the students don't really have to know that. So I'm going to go ahead and login as a student, so you can see what their view is
So I'm logged in as a student. And the very first thing I see here are books that I've downloaded recently. And then here are the reading lists to which the student has been assigned
And so this is my students view. So then let's say they find, you know, they know about a list of Heroes of Olympus books and they want to read one of these
They have the option to either read now which opens it and Bookshare web reader or to download it.
And you can see here, they can choose from various formats so Daisy texts being one, but they can also download it and audio BRF is braille ready format. So that's going to just be for those folks who are using braille devices.
Epub is great if they're going to read on ibooks or another tool that specifically calls for Epub format.
And they can also download the book in Word. This is relatively new as well and pretty much all Bookshare books are available now in Word which means it's going to be a
Microsoft Word file that gets put wherever their downloads go on their computer and they can access that and open it up in word
And if they upload it to word online, they can use the immersive reader in Word online to read that, but
But so Daisy is one of the many download formats. But as I said, those who need it pretty much know generally what it is.
Other questions. Yeah. Maybe one more from the group. We've been answering a number in the chat as well but for
Students, if you want to get a student any individual membership, do they need to first have an organizational one
Right. Great question. So, this the process is the most smooth if the student is on a school account already, and I'll explain why that is the process that I showed of
The student having their own you know their, their login to their school account and then being getting an opportunity to add
An individual membership of their own to it means that nobody at home has to fill out a proof of disability form because we know that proof of disability has already been established by the school. So if someone
Comes to Bookshare and signs up completely on their own. So a parent wants to sign up their student, they can do that. They can sign up as an individual.
But what they're going to see, is there going to be prompted once they fill out some information.
By way of their, you know, name and their disability and that kind of thing they're going to be prompted to print a proof of disability, which then they need to go have go get signed by
competent authority just indicate someone who can verify the yes the student has a
Condition that prevents them from reading or processing printed text and then they have to send in that form they can
Take a picture of it and email it or they can mail it or they can fax it but they basically have to send in a physical form.
That indicates proof of disability. So the benefit of a student going through the school account. First is that they skip the parent doesn't have to submit that form. So it's a smoother process, but certainly
If a parent wants to, they can just go to a Bookshare directly and sign up their student or student can sign themselves up if they're over 18
Without any parent participation.
Any other questions.
And at the moment, but, uh, you know, a great shout out to the we also got a number of comments on some of the tools that Chromebooks and Mac books that are working well with teachers. So it's also great to get feedback and whats working well.
Excellent. I love it. Thank. Yeah, that's great to hear. We'd love to hear you know what works, what is working what's working well for you and you know any issues that you're having to, you know, feel free to let us know about those. We'd like to be able to help with those
Let's see.
Okay.
Okay, great. So we will just take another quick look to see if there are any other questions.
But it looks like we've got lots of great questions and we're able to answer them both in the chat and then some verbally, so
I think that's probably all we're going to get through today. Let me quickly put up
Some information that you might find helpful for
asking questions after this webinar. Let me just get there really quick.
So I've put up the Bookshare contact information.
So you can visit, as I said, the Help Center, find our training and resources library with lots of how to guides and helps the user community that I mentioned earlier, or you can email or call. Call us with questions and we can certainly be available to help out.
And I think that's, that's all we've got. Let me actually put up my information again if anyone would like to email me directly as well. You're welcome to
There's my email address and my phone number. So we're here to help. We hope that you found this helpful. And that you're going to try out the new features and use those the school year.
And if there are other things that we can do to Bookshare easier for you would love to learn about those. So please stay in touch.
Let us know how it's going and how we can help, and especially if you have success stories you have students who are
Succeeding using Bookshare, please let us know that as well. We'd love to be able to share that information with everyone else, too. So we'd love to hear those stories about students who are really becoming great readers and enjoying the world of reading thanks to Bookshare
So thanks to my colleagues for their help and we're going to go ahead and sign off. Thanks everybody for joining and have a great school year.
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