DailyLit sends you bite-sized reading material every day
October 12, 2010
What? You don’t have time to read an entire book? You’re too busy with your computer or your cell phone or your mobile device? DailyLit adds a little bit of literature to your day by sending you small, readable sections of ebooks. The site promises that the reading installments will take about five minutes, and the reader sets the time and method of delivery of the text (either email or RSS feed). Instead of you going to the books, the books are coming to you.
DailyLit has more than 1,000 classic books that mostly seem to be free ebooks you can find in other places, too. You won’t find The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, for example, but you will find a collection of humor stories from the 1920s, a book about architecture from Frank Lloyd Wright, and children’s stories ranging from The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn to Rudyard Kipling’s Just So Stories. There are multiple ways to search the site, such as by category, by name, and even by word cloud.
In the classroom
If you have an interactive whiteboard, you could post the small daily excerpts of stories first thing in the morning and let students follow the tale day by day. Given the size of the text, that could last an entire year. If you do read-aloud activities with your students, the daily sections might make for a manageable reading to start off class. Or, if you have high school students, you could encourage them to sign up at the site to receive their own stories on their mobile devices, and get them reading in the environment they feel most comfortable with.
Related stuff
Free-Reading: A Freeloading Teacher’s Best Friend
60 Second Recap summarizes classic literature
Students create their own summer reading lists at The Book Seer
