Worldreader, a group of people busy bringing Kindles into loads of schools in Africa have just released this rather charming video of a bunch of kids learning to read using their Kindles.

You may be saying “so what?  Just a bunch of kids reading out loud in their classroom.”   But the point of this video is not to show you how good at reading aloud these kids are, but the happy fact that each kid has an ereader in front of them, and those ereaders are effectively owned by those kids.  This in a part of the world where it is more normal for a school to have only a small handful of battered books for kids to read from.

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Thanks to an amazing grant of $300 000 that Worldreader have received from USAID, World Vision, & AusAID, they have started up another ereader/ebook project in Ghana, the country where it all began for them.

This new project called “All Children Reading” is only possible because of the generosity of those three aid organisations, and that money will translate into about 1800 Kindles, and of course the many thousands of ebooks that can be carried in these Kindles.

Just think about this for a second.  It means that another almost 2000 kids and their families and communities will now have access to thousands of books, both text books for school use and novels for pleasure reading – Currently Worldreader has distributed some 200 000 copies of ebooks to the four countries they are operating in in Africa.   When you think that before Worldreader started their work, most of these poor rural schools would have had – at best – a couple of old and dog-eared books to be shared between all the kids in the school…  Now they have access to hundreds and thousands of books, both in English and in local languages (this last also thanks to the work of Worldreader who have encouraged African writers and publishers to publish their work in ebook form).

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In a few days you will be able to cast your votes for Worldreader at the American Giving Awards on NBC.

Specifically as from 27th November until 4th December you can cast your vote for Worldreader in a number of places online, (see links below).

Worldreader is one of 25 charities who have been chosen to stand a chance of winning a grant of $1 000 000 if they receive enough votes, so it is up to all of us who care for literacy and the future to support them by the simple and painless means of simply casting a vote online in that short period.

As you may know, Worldreader is a not-for-profit group who have set themselves the task of bringing ereaders (Kindles) and ebooks to the poorer rural schools in various African countries.

So far they have been busy in Ghana, Uganda and Kenya and have distributed several hundred thousand free ebooks to over a thousand kids in a number of rural schools in those countries.  They have also encouraged African publishers and writers to support their work by issuing ebooks that relate closely to the kid’s experiences of life.

The work they do in the various schools is assessed regularly by independent experts, and so far has shown great success, the reading abilities of the kids have rocketed upwards, and as a result, so has their general level of scholastic attainment.   Literacy is the key to development in this world, that is for sure.

And, as you will see if you read any of the posts I have written about their work, they have bought pleasure and dreams into the lives of thousands of kids, their families and communities, as mostly the Kindles are actually given to the kids, so the influence of ebooks spreads through the entire village community, not simply as a classroom resource.

So please use the links below to cast your vote for Worldreader and with an investment of about 5 minutes of your time, give a real chance of a vastly better life to many thousands of kids in Africa….   All of you please.  If you have a Facebook page or other such social media, please do share this post with all your contacts there as well, and ask them to do the same … and thus the good word will spread.

So here are the details:-

When to vote:

From 27th November to 4th December;

How to vote:

If you are in the USA;

You can vote online at these two sites:

Chase Giving Website

Chase Giving Facebook Page.

For people outside the USA:

https://apps.facebook.com/americangivingawards/charity/view/id/10  (this page will be alive from 27th November).

When will we know the results?

NBC will air the whole thing on 8th December, and I will certainly report on the results here as well.

Link to Worldreader:

Synopsis:  The Ectaco JetBook, the world’s first full colour e-ink ereader has been taken up by Brooklyn Technical High School after having been used with success in schools all over Russia and Europe since the launch of this model.

This ereader, which has been designed specifically for educational use and been tried out in the real world of schools for a while now, and apparently proven to be exactly what is needed in such a device for educational use, has now moved into the USA.

What Ectaco have produced here is a serious ereader with a full colour e-ink touch screen, which is large enough to be used in a classroom, but not so large that it is cumbersome, and which has been filled with a most impressive list of functions designed for school use in a variety of disciplines.  Further, it works with a wide range of ebook formats, so enabling schools to create their own content too, should they so wish.

No text books in ebook form?

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The number of kids who now have ereaders or tablets has increased enormously during the Christmas break (now why would this be so you might wonder?   Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm)

School librarians are happy and worried by this:

Lets look at the worried side of this first.  There seem to be a couple of main points about this increase in kid’s use of ereaders that worries school librarians, the first one is to do with what was rather charmingly referred to as “Digital Citizenry” by one school librarian.  In this context it relates to illegal downloads of ebooks.

This particular librarian had been approached by a number of the kids in her school with the request to help with installing ePub ebooks on their shiny new ereaders.  In the course of helping them she noticed that the ereaders had way more ebook in them already than the kids could possibly have paid for…  So she not unreasonably feels that the subject of theft of digital media needs to be carefully addressed in schools now.

I was slightly puzzled by this, since if the kids already had filled their ereaders with illegal copies of ebooks, how had they done that if they apparently needed help installing ePub ebooks?  Sort of gap in the logic here.  But none the less, the point is a good one.

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Worldreader have been given a large collection of Puffin and Roald Dahl ebooks for those lucky kids in Africa to enjoy on their Kindle ereaders

Worldreader’s Director of Digital  Publishing, Elizabeth Wood announced this at the Frankfurt Conference 2011 in the following way:

This is a huge win for the children in our programs. Dahl’s wicked sense of humor has delighted children—and adults—in the developed world for more than 50 years.  Now, children in the developing world will have the opportunity to meet Matilda, Augustus Gloop, the evil Aunties Spiker and Sponge, and all of the other wonderful characters from Dahl’s beloved classics. This is the caliber of books we want to offer the children in our programs.  We encourage other publishers to follow suit.  Ask yourself what books would turn reluctant readers into avid readers?  Those are the books we want.

This is yet another sign of how successful the projects that the good folk of Worldreader are being, and the sort of response that they need to make the whole idea flourish.

Obviously those kids in Ghana and Kenya will have enormous fun reading these books, books that seem to be able to cross borders and cultures with no trouble, appealing to something that all kids seem to have inside them.. a sort of anarchic view of their worlds.

For their part, Puffin in the person of Francesca Dow, managing director of Penguin Children’s Books, had this to say.

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