Children's Audio Books Online

Check out the "Stories" section of the AOL Kid's website! They have famous children's books for kids to listen to online. Each word highlights as the narrator reads the story. They have some of the Arthur book series, famous fairy tales, and rhyming books. This would make a great learning center for teachers who still have a computer station in their classrooms. Plug in a headset, listen to the story, and complete a follow-up activity.

Lookybook: Preview Children's Books Before You Buy

Lookybook is a site that allows parents and teachers to preview kids' books before they buy them. Ever wonder about this as you look at books on Amazon.com? Granted, Lookybook does not have the same vast quantity of books as Amazon does, but the site is adding more and more books with time. Lookybook also allows you to embed the book into your blog or website so kids can get a feel of the story. Finally, if you like the book, you can click the link to buy it. You can browse Lookybook without a username and password, but if you create an account, you can add books to your "shelf" to flag your favorites. See example below:

Quintura Kids is a new search engine that boasts to be the “first visual search engine for the youngest web users”. They state that they “help to find kid-related information on the web easily and interactively”. At first glance, I noticed the search engine was colorful and eye-catching. Users can click on a word from the “cloud” of topics or type in their own word. What I really liked about Quintura was that the site helps children narrow the number of websites to choose from by clicking on the word clouds that appear. For example, I typed in the word “Germany” into the field and it returned with 47 hits. The “cloud” of subtopics revises above the field to reflect my choice of Germany. Now there are subtopics I can choose that range from pictures to maps to history to famous Germans. If I click on “pictures”, the pages are narrowed to 24 hits. Clicking on “Rhine River” lowers that number to 18, and so on. Children would find this very user friendly when looking for information on the Internet. The only aspect I didn’t like was that the user had to click “new search” hidden in the upper right hand corner of the web page in order to start again. Otherwise words and clicks from the “cloud” would be added onto your existing query. As an educator, I’m not promoting unsupervised surfing on the Internet. Children need to be supervised and have guidelines when on the Internet. (See my previous entry on Internet Safety.)

There is an adult version of this search engine available at quintura.com. It isn’t as colorful, but works the same way as the children’s version. On their home page, they state: “type a query or navigate the cloud; refine your cloud; save it; or share it”. After the user types in a query, he/she can click to “share” the results which will email the page to friends or to save it for later use. How cool!