TRANSCRIPT
TSBVI Tech Tea Time: Bookshare
2/20/25
 
>>Lara Rondberg: My name is Laura Ronberg and I am a program manager with Bookshare. I've been with Bookshare for about 12 years now. And has seen the program just change and grow. Just so many great ways. So I ask, you know, if you maybe use Bookshare, but long time ago I think you'll be really excited just with some of the new features and just how easy everything works. You'll be hearing all about Bookshare who is eligible, the different Bookshare book formats and the different tools to read Bookshare books. But before I go on to that, I'll just real quickly, my colleague, Mary Ann Mendez is here. And Mary Ann, do you just want to introduce yourself real quickly?

>>Mary Ann Mendez: I'm happy to. My name is Mary Ann Mendez. I apologize not on camera, but I thought it was more important you could hear me than to see me today. And I'm having a bit of technical difficulties. I think I'll go with what Donna shared that it's called. So hi, everyone. I am Marianne Mendez. I am the manager of Bookshare Customer Support. As well as that I have the privilege of also having been a Bookshare member for the past two decades. And so I get to bring with me a wealth of experience as a totally blind bookshare user, but also the manager of the customer support team who support our members. As well as that I manage a team with people who are also blind and low vision on my support team. So it's so nice to be here with all of you today.

>>Lara Rondberg: Very much. I'm going to start by just going over some slides, some basic Bookshare info, and then we'll go on to the website and show you the educator experience. The student experience. And then we'll have plenty of time for some questions and answers as well. So just the real basic, you know, what is Bookshare? Bookshare is an online library of millions of ebooks, including textbooks. And each one of those million plus titles are all available in a variety of accessible formats, including audio. Audio with highlighted digital text. Braille and large print. So every one plus million title can be accessed in the way a person needs and prefers to read. Best of all, Bookshare is free for all qualified US students of any age. We'll get into the qualifications in a bit. Bookshare is always free for students in schools. That's pre-K, K-12, post-secondary, adult education and vocational education programs. As long as someone is a student, they will be able to get Bookshare for free and that is thanks to our funding by the US Department of Education Office of Special Education Programs. The collection is very wide. It contains textbooks, books for assigned and pleasure reading. Bestsellers and award winners. We have the New York Times bestsellers, all the major literary award winners. Career and technical training materials. Study guides for the different standardized tests that students may take as they go through school. The GED and the high set study guides, the SATs, the LSATs, the MCATs, all the different major educational assessments that they might take. Really a great, you know, the dummies collection. It's a very vast, pretty much any book that you would find In a bookstore on Amazon, required reading for school, and again. Books for people of all ages. The collection is always growing. We have partnerships with hundreds of publishers and as new books are published, we often get them and they are available often the same day as they are available to the public. What makes Bookshare different than some of the other audiobook programs out there or libraries is that the Bookshare books are always available for teachers and students. Some of the digital book libraries have, you have to place a hold Or check out the book or you only have access to the title for two weeks and then it disappears. There's no limits on access. So once a teacher has provided the book to the student, assigned the book to the student, they will have access for as long as they need. They can use Bookshare at home. Outside of the school day. I know there's some other digital book libraries that some schools use access is cut off when the school day is over. So 24 7 365 days a year access to the Bookshare collection. So Bookshare does operate with some eligibility criteria. Bookshare operates under a provision in the copyright law that says if a person of any age whose interaction with traditional print is impacted by a visual impairment A reading or learning disability or a physical disability that they are entitled to accessible versions of published works. So that is what enables an entity like Benetech, the company that runs Bookshare. Enables us to share copyrighted material with people who do have a barrier to reading traditional print. So it's the way the law is written, it's pretty vague. There's no medical criteria. They have to have a certain level of vision or a certain diagnosis of a reading or learning disability or a specific physical disability is just really anyone who Can't pick up a book in their hands and turn the pages like maybe someone with cerebral palsy They can't see the words on the page. Due to low vision or blindness, or they can't comprehend or decode the words on the page due to a reading or learning disability such as dyslexia So it's really up to you all, the educators to determine if the student you're working with is eligible for Bookshare. Students do not need an IEP or 504 plan. Again, it's just up to the education professionals to determine if they are having the visual reading or learning or physical disability that is making it difficult for them to read traditional print. Bookshare is a great resource. It saves teachers time and energy. Again, it's free, which is always great for school districts. But it's providing that immediate access to the accessible materials. I know a lot of districts or states even have their own repository of audiobooks or digital materials. But often an educator may have to request it There might be a week, days or weeks turnaround time to receive the material. Everything with Bookshare is in the cloud. So the books are always available to people when they need it. Educators assign books through the Bookshare website, and I will be demonstrating that. And so anywhere that educators are that they have internet access or cell service. They can get to a website. They can go on and assign books to students. And students are given their own username and passwords. So they log into the Bookshare website or on their device and have access to their materials. So they can do this at home. On the weekends, over the summer, they are able to access their books with less teacher or adult intervention, which can really foster independence. We also provide some free reading tools. There's a variety of ways that people can read, but Bookshare does have what we call our Bookshare Reader, which I will go into a little bit more. So we are providing the content, you know, the books The materials students need to read for school, plus some free ways to read it. Read the content quite easily. So you can read Bookshare Books on computers and Chromebooks, smartphones and tablets. Braille devices, the Alexa smart speaker. And other specialized assistive technology devices that people might be using either at school or at home. So it does not require any specialized equipment that only is Bookshare specific. It's the devices people are already using at home and school. We have what we call our Bookshare Reader. There's Bookshare Reader for web that will work on any computer or Chromebooks, PC, Mac, or Chromebooks. There's the Bookshare Reader mobile app for smartphones and tablets, and there's an iOS and Android version. And there's a book share skill for the Alexa smart speaker for someone that can just wants to speak to their smart speaker and listen to their book. With our reading tools, there's a lot of options for customizing the reading experience. Users can select the font type and size. So for a student with low vision who just needs a very large font, they can easily adjust that right on their computer, Chromebook or a mobile device They can select the voice that they want the book read to. They can select the voice speed. And they can adjust the color and contrast, which is also helpful for some people with with low vision, just having a different contrast and I will be demonstrating that can really help them access the text in the way that works for them. So Bookshare, the audio that is used to read Bookshare books is based on what is built into the device the person is using. So if you are on a PC and using Edge Browser, there's some voices that are built into the Edge browser. If you're on a PC and using Chrome. Chrome has a voice, so it will use the voice the synthesized text to speech voices that are built into whatever device. Smartphones and iPads, tablets have a whole other set of voices built in. But for someone that wants to listen to the book that the audio is The synthesized text-to-speech. Which that again is also different. There's some other digital book libraries that do use human narrated books. But using that auto generated text to speech is what enables us to have such a large collection and such a timely collection. Again, the book The day it's released to the public, we often have it. And once it goes into our system, there's some magic that happens. And that book file is automatically converted to an audio mp3 or Daisy Audio, the digital text file formats, and can be easily read. So it's you know really People can choose to read in the way that works best for them. So I mentioned our Bookshare Reader for web. It is formatted. The website is accessible We do a lot of testing on it to make sure it's easily navigated by people. With visual impairments, whether they're using JAWS or other screen reading software, that they can easily tab through and get to the places they need to with hotkeys for navigation. The mobile devices, our reader and some of the other mobile devices, which I'll talk about can be connected to refreshable braille displays as long as that that device enables voiceover or talkback. So there's really just a lot of different ways to read in the ways that people like to read. And someday a student might read in Braille and the next day they just might want to listen to something. So they have every book, they have the option of reading it in the way That they wish. The Bookshare books are available in a variety of different download formats. Daisy Text, Digital Accessible Information System, which is An accessible file format that can be read on daisy players, braille note takers. Some of the scan and read software such as the Kurzweil systems that are out there. That's one of the file formats. The BRF, the Braille refreshable format for use digital braille with refreshable braille devices and embossers Audio and users have a choice of having the audio in MP3 or daisy audio. There's daisy audio players. I mean, MP3, someone could download and put on their phone and just listen with their headphones on their phone. Also, EPUB, which is a digital, very accessible digital text format that's kind of considered now the gold standard in accessible digital formats. That are compatible with many large scale reading applications. The books app that's built into all Apple products. There's a thorium reader, which is a free EPUB reader There's other ones out there that people can use as well. Every book can also be downloaded just as a Word document. Which has its uses. Maybe someone just needs a large print could download the book in Word and adjust the font the way you would with any Word document. There are some braille devices that you can import a Word document and it will scan the text in the Word document and convert it to Braille. So again, there are a lot of different devices out there. Some that have different requirements or compatibility of what type of formats they can read. So when you are thinking about getting books to your students, think about what type of devices they have access to and what will be the best way for them to read. So books for students who are served at their school or on the district level. They have to have books assigned to them by their teachers. So sponsors, we call educators in our system sponsors They get the books to students by assigning to them. They can do that directly on the website and I will be demonstrating that. And then students can log on to the Bookshore website or a device and they will read their assigned books. Sponsors can also download the book file for each student. It downloads, when you download it, it goes to your computer, wherever downloads go. You unzip the file and then you can email the file to them or upload it to a shared drive where they're able to log in and access the file. Then they would import the file into the device that they're using. So just to keep in mind with those file formats, there are cases where sometimes you do, the teacher does download the file format, but there's also ways of where you'll never have to download a file format. Depending on how your students read. So Bookshark offers a couple different account types that are of relevance to students. So what we call the accounts that a school or a district signs up for, or we call them our book share organizational accounts. Some districts want one Bookshare account for use for all the students across the district. Others want each school building to have their own account. It really varies or some combination of each. But if your school or district doesn't have a Bookshare account already. An educator could go to bookshore.org, our website. There's a sign up button and you would select sign up school. When the teacher educator creates the Bookshare account. They then add their students who qualify. They add their other colleagues who have need to access Bookshare for students. And then that is just what's called the organizational account Again, always free for schools and students and they serve the students that way. Students can also get an individual membership, and that could be something a parent might sign their child up outside of school. And again, that will be free for them. And students can have both type of accounts as well. And I'll go into a little bit more about how you make that happen. But typically you as educators, if your school or district does not already have an account. You would select the sign up school account. You would be signing up your school, your school building or district for the account. You wouldn't be signing up an individual member for membership for a student on our website directly because the parent does have to sign off on that. But those are the types of accounts that pertain to students. Bookshare does, you can have Bookshare memberships for non-students. That's why you see the $79.99. And what I have on my screen is just a screenshot of our signup page. But for when someone is no longer a student, if they wish to continue with Bookshare, they can opt for a paid membership, which is $79.99 a year. But again, students, once they transition out of the K-12 system, if they're going on to a post-secondary program. Or a vocational or career educational program, it will still be free for them. So on those organization accounts that are created at the school district level. The educators can easily create that. There's no contracts. Again, Bookshare is free. There is one form that has to be sent in. It's called the organizational agreement form. And that really just has to do with copyright compliance and attesting that you're only going to make Bookshare available to the students who qualify. Then the students and other educators are added. And teachers assign books. Students are given that username and password. They log in on their device of their choice and read the book. But they can only read the books that have been assigned to them. So this comes up sometimes. The Bookshare Library contains books for people of all ages, all genres. And sometimes educators get concerned. They might look, search the collection and see an adult book that might not be appropriate for a second grader. But just to reassure you that students can only read the books that they're teachers have assigned to them. Now, students can get that individual membership. It can be added on to their school account. So once they're on that school or district account, an educator can facilitate adding on that individual membership. The parent does sign off on that, but it's a very easy process. It's all done through the website. And I really just remind people to really consider that for all students, especially when they're transitioning at a K-12. When they have that individual membership, they then can take their Bookshare account with them wherever they go. Maybe they wait a year and then they start a post-secondary program or they go right into a program They will have access to Bookshare and any books that they would need for their new their you know, post-12 From day one. So no waiting to ask, go to the disability support office at the college and ask for someone to get the book for them. They can do that on their own. With the individual membership, they can read the book, any book from the collection For people under 18, they can't access anything that a publisher has labeled as adult content. But they want to read about a hobby they have or they play a, you know, maybe they're learning about a sport and they want to read about They're a sports hero or they want to read the Harry Potter books That are our most popular books year after year. That individual membership gives them access to reef for fun when they want to. So the teachers can still assign their books. And they… can then also read the books that they want to read for fun. So that is kind of an overview of what Bookshare is, the books in the collection. Who can access it, how students get the books. Before I go on to demo the website, I just want to see if there's any questions at this point or Marianne, if there's something you think I didn't add or want to clarify. For you to jump in.

>>Mary Ann Mendez: One of the benefits of the website-based reader that Laura will demonstrate is that can be used on any website. When we talk about Bookshare Reader for web you actually can't use that. Via the web browser on a mobile device if you prefer a more web-based environment instead of our mobile reader itself. So when we talk about flexibility to read how and what way works best for each student we really do offer that level of flexibility. So wanting to make sure that we added that when we talk about our reader for web that even can be used on a mobile device or on any device that has a web browser to log in via that browser to access the books directly.

>>Lara Rondberg: Yeah, great point. Thank you. And I will be demonstrating that in a bit. And Donna, if there was any questions in the chat.

>>Donna: There were no questions in the chat, but one did come through the Q&A. It says, are there books, and this is Elizabeth asking, if there are books that would be beneficial for children less than three years old.

>>Lara Rondberg: Okay.

>>Donna: Can ECI have a Bookshare account? Great question.

>>Lara Rondberg: Great question. And working more with the early childhood field was something that the last, I'd say, one to two years We were encouraged by our Department of Education funders to kind of beef up resources for books for early childhood that are relevant to those young kiddos. And also more outreach and training to early childhood providers. So most certainly there are certainly there are there are books and there's some collections that were put together in support of that. That hopefully I'll be able to find to share. But yes, they will be. And when we get to finding the books, I'll show you a way of searching. To try to find some of those books that are geared towards the emerging readers and the very young kids. Yeah.

>>Donna: Awesome. Zatima asks. Is it the same process for a private school student?

>>Lara Rondberg: We pushed it. Yes. Yeah. Private schools can also create an organizational account for their school and add their students, just like public schools so it's It's public schools, private schools, parents who homeschool their kids can sign up for an individual membership. As well. So it's all students, charter schools Does it matter? We support all, even though our funding is from Department of Education our uh our uh kind of a sphere that we support is all education settings.

>>Mary Ann Mendez: Charter schools yes

>>Donna: Awesome questions. Patrice asks or comments and maybe we can have some help for her here, that she has tried downloading a BRF to emboss it but is not able to.

>>Mary Ann Mendez: That's a good question. And so I think what would help is to learn more about When you say you're not able to what is happening when you try and you know we are absolutely available to help with embossing questions either after or if you reach out to the support team directly. And you can actually reach out to me directly You can call our support number. At six five zero 352-0198. Again, that's six five zero 3520198. I'm Marianne Mendez, and since I'm here talking with all of you at the webinar, if you call in and you get someone else, which you will. Get someone on my team, you can say, hi, I was at a webinar and Marianne was there and she told me to ask for her. And then I can help you with some of those advanced kinds of questions. There are settings in your accounts that you can use to determine length of cells lines per page, et cetera. And then when you say you can't emboss. You know, we all know the joys of embossers, right? And then making sure that The embosser settings are as you hoped that they would be in conjunction with the BRF files and with Duxbury or whatever embossing software you're using. So I know that those require a lot of multifaceted aspects to support. We're totally happy to help you with that directly. You're not alone if that helps.

>>Lara Rondberg: Thank you.

>>Donna: Definitely not alone. Thank you very much, Marianne, for offering that and giving. We put the number in the chat. So if you need to copy that down.

>>Mary Ann Mendez: Hmm. Great.

>>Donna: Angie has a question. We have great questions today. I'm so excited.

>>Donna: She says she heard that you say Bookshare is for students of all ages. She supports kids zero to six. And their parents in their home. Can I recommend they get a Bookshare account?

>>Lara Rondberg: Yeah, certainly. And again, the reading materials for the really young You know, that are geared towards the super young readers. It's not as many as maybe for K-12 itself, but they're definitely in there and books you know that again we had made the effort of trying to get some more in. So yeah, you can definitely recommend When parents sign their child up outside of a school system, they do have to get a form signed as a proof of disability form that any doctor or therapists can sign, you know, and then they have to send that in. But yeah, so for any person of any age. Who meets the qualifications And they can get access to Bookshare.

>>Donna: Great questions. And that was the last one from chat or Q&A.

>>Lara Rondberg: All right. Well, thank you. I will go on with the website, the platform demo. So I am logged in on the Bookshare website, Bookshare.org. I'm logged in as a teacher. And our system, educators are called sponsors and the students are members, but I've logged into, you know, say this is my district account or school account. Everyone has has the same sees the same thing. I'm on my Bookshare page, which is the dashboard. It's where you add your students, you add your colleagues. Among other things. The members link, so there's under the my bookshire heading, there's a members link That takes you to the member roster. Where the students who are on the account. And so if this is a district account All the different members from all the schools in the district will be here. So everyone is basically logging into the same account and having access to the same information. You might just have a caseload of one or two students in a district, but you would see all the students and those could be the students who qualify based on having dyslexia or having a physical disability. Everyone's on the roster Or just with students within your school. It's very easy to add a member. There's an add member button. And it pulls up the ad. We call it the add new member pop-up box and you would put in the student's first name, last name, birth date and grade. And then students are given a username and password that can be an email, it can be an student ID number, it can be a nickname, anything the student will remember. It's an open field to enter that. There's drop down menus for district or school. What comes up under the dropdown box for school will be the schools that the current members on the roster have been that who have been added already. If you don't see the right school for the student, there's an add new button and you can type in That field, that is just one way of sorting the roster. You can sort just for school. And then there's a qualifying information section that says this form serves as proof of disability in place of sending signed documentation. So you as the teachers do not need to send us any documentation. You simply check the check boxes that say visual learning or physical. One or more of those of the qualifying condition that student has. And that's it. That is you attesting that in your best professional knowledge, the student is eligible for Bookshare. If they have an IEP or 504, there's check boxes for that. Again, they're not They do not need to have one or the others of those. To qualify for Bookshare. Students who have IEPs do have access to a subset of textbooks in the National Instructional Materials Access Center. Which is a federal repository of textbooks in accessible format. So if they do have an IEP, check that. There are some textbooks that we don't have in the Bookshare collection that are in that repository and students can get that book just directly from Bookshare if they have an iep so Check it if they have it, but don't let that be a deterrent to adding a student. You get that information. Into their about who they are, their information. Then also on this form, there's a reading preference. Dropdown menu where you can set a default download. And this is just optional. You don't have to set it unless there's a specific need. You can determine whether for audio you prefer MP3 or daisy audio for that student. There's the BRF size and format where you have options for refreshable braille displays. Options and if you're embossing. So I think this was Marianne was mentioning Yeah, that if you're having issues, you can come in here. It is student specific.

>>Mary Ann Mendez: That's right. Yep.

>>Lara Rondberg: And hear what you're saying so you know you're going to do an embossable braille where you want 40 cells and 25 lines for that student. You could select that. And so this is where you could, and then the Braille grade. And we have UEB and EBAE. Grade two and grade one. So you can set that up. For your students.

>>Donna: And before you, Laura, sorry to interrupt you there. Before you go on, because we did have a question about those default settings and explaining what the difference of those are for maybe some of our newer folks that haven't used Bookshare or different file formats before.

>>Lara Rondberg: Sure. So by setting the default That just means when you go to download a book for a student, it will be at the top of the dropdown menu. It will be the default, basically. So if you hit download. And you have specified that for this student, you want Daisy text only. That everything they read will be coming from a Daisy text. When you hit download, you won't have to go through the dropdown. The system will just know that for this student, you want a daisy text. Or for audio, if the student has a daisy player that plays daisy audio, that's the only audio player that they have access to. When you select audio as the download format, it will know to download that in Daisy. So again, these are, you don't have to set a default unless, you know, just make it a little easier. When you're downloading or if you know that that student can only have that file format based on the device. But you still do an emotion.

>>Mary Ann Mendez: Just a… a little bit to add even more granularity for those who will find comfort here. So if a student has an 18 cell brill display as an example or a 40 cell or 20. These are your opportunities to specify that again So that in the future when you are trying to download for a specific student. And maybe every student you have a different Braille display or that you know some have a mantis while others have a brilliant or Or they have a smart beetle, the tiniest little brother display with 14 cells, you can specify those formats here Or maybe the student wants to be able to open it in a Word document. Or you do and you want to be able to allow that student to access that Word document. Via their braille display. And you want to have that student download that in a Word doc. And then transfer it to their braille display. Some students are more technical, as we all know, than others. They want to be able to transfer that Word document to a certain braille displays that can support it. You specify that here. You never have to think about it again, unless you want to make a change That is for one-time use, then you can adjust as you need to like but the idea is the idea is Right. Yep.

>>Lara Rondberg: Right. You're not limited to what you select here. Yeah, thank you for adding that.

>>Donna: That was a great question. Rosalba. Did that answer what you were looking for? Just want to do a quick check there before we move on. And kind of jumping back to what we had talked about previously, Juanita asked if a zero to three student is enrolled in their zoned school, can they sign up for Bookshare using that school? Even though they're zero to three. Awesome.

>>Lara Rondberg: Yes. Oh, wait. I see what you're saying. They don't need to be connected to a school to get the account. Just, you know, obviously a very young child, a school age child, we know they're a student so They don't have to be affiliated with a school yet if they are and if that if there's an early childhood program that has their own Bookshare account, then they could add that student. But if they don't and the parent is just signing them up independently. And I think, Marianne, it asks, you know, is this for a student and then it will ask for the name of the school, but they don't have to fill that in. Castile.

>>Mary Ann Mendez: They don't, or they can indicate that they're homeschooled. And then the only difference is when it's an individual membership, the parent has to prove the disability As opposed to the teacher. And so that is when the form that Laura was walking through

>>Lara Rondberg: Yeah.

>>Mary Ann Mendez: That's when the parent needs to submit that form. And because the child is so young, chances are high that the parent is going to need to be able to log in that that child since they may not have the skills to do that themselves at such a young age so that The parent would ideally know how to use the device that the child is logging in with. And then the parent would need to help the child find the book. Or get help from get help from you as the educator for that young reader. But that student doesn't need to have an access through a school already. They can sign up as an individual member.

>>Donna: And Angie asks if there was a link to the form for the parents for the proved the disability the proof of disability form for the parents.

>>Mary Ann Mendez: We do have a link for the proof of disability form. There is an advantage to creating the account first. So the parent signs up. Under the child's name. And then what happens is when they download the form, it's pre-populated with all the information.

>>Donna: Oh.

>>Lara Rondberg: Yeah, with their information, yeah. And then they can just print it out and take it to the doctor or therapist who's working, you know.

>>Mary Ann Mendez: So the… Right. Or they can email it to the doctor, but it has all the information in it that's already been filled out so the the procedure would really be the parent lock the parent goes to bookshare.org they go to create the account.

>>Lara Rondberg: Yeah.

>>Mary Ann Mendez: And then they choose the individual membership. They literally sign up for the child, sometimes parents think that they should be signing up under their name, but they're really actually signing up with the child's name since the child owns that proof of that disability. And then when the parent downloads the form from the account. That child's name, date of birth, all the information that the parent entered when they created the account is already pre-populated in the form They can print it or they can just email the form to the doctor. And the doctor can fill out the information and send it back. And then you send it to us via email. There are instructions. Walking you through the process on the website as you create the account.

>>Lara Rondberg: Down the horn.

>>Donna: Great. Wonderful. Elizabeth asked Can you select more than one disability, vision, physical, and learning.

>>Lara Rondberg: Yes. Yep.

>>Donna: Great question, Elizabeth. And Joellen asked if If under the district it lists three variations on the district's name and it looks like the list of students is different on each. Should that be cleaned up and by whom?

>>Lara Rondberg: Yeah, unfortunately, that Yeah, unfortunately, yeah. So here I'm on the member roster and under the school field, you'll see it says sample, sample school twice.

>>Mary Ann Mendez: Hmm.

>>Lara Rondberg: This is something we have asked our engineers over and over like even we can't go in and edit it um and so Like if someone puts JFK Elementary and then someone puts in JFK Elementary School, it will see that as two separate schools.

>>Mary Ann Mendez: Right.

>>Lara Rondberg: So the only thing you can do is You can go into by selecting the pencil icon next to the student's name, you can go in and edit their profile. And you can… you know like set it to no school, save it and then go back like if you determine there's three instances of a school name, we're always going to use the first one or like create a new one Do it in caps and make everyone move update everyone's profile to the one all in caps or something like that that you know that's the right one. But yeah, unfortunately. I, again, almost 12 years old With Bookshare, it's like identify that early on that that's a, and, you know, they're like well I thought, oh, for sure, I can go in the back end and delete it, but no, fortunately can't. But that is, you know, theoretically how you would filter a roster by school name. But yes, if the school name is added in more than once maybe a typo in one.

>>Donna: Oh, yeah.

>>Lara Rondberg: It will not, you'll have to kind of keep sorting. So yeah, sorry, sorry about that.

>>Donna: Great question. And Juanita asked if there's a flyer for parents that could introduce them to Bookshare. Awesome program, by the way. And I totally agree, Juanita.

>>Lara Rondberg: Wonderful. And I believe, Donna, I sent you um Yeah, so if there's a way of making that available, if not, I can, we can put the links The flyers.

>>Donna: Yeah. Uh-huh.

>>Lara Rondberg: Marianne, I don't know if you easy access to that. If not, I can show you on our website where it is that you can download, but one page front and back flyer. That's just a very general, what is Bookshare? But yeah, you could get to parents, you can give to other educators and we have a

>>Donna: The handouts are linked.

>>Lara Rondberg: Pdf and Word, accessible Word and English and Spanish too.

>>Donna: Great questions. And we linked those, Juanita, right back into the chat. If you jump to that link for handouts, you'll find all the all the good stuff.

>>Lara Rondberg: Oh, great. All right. Well, okay. So we added our student. You're going to want to find books for them. There's a search bar at the top of the page where you can search on title, author, or ISBN. I typed in Harry Potter. I got 655 results. It's every Harry Potter book, every copyright version, every edition. Of every Harry Potter book, screenplays about Harry Potter. Looks like there's a new Lego Harry Pottery encyclopedia. So again, that's a very broad search. So if you're looking for a specific edition of the book, we'd recommend searching on ISBN. We also have an advanced search link where you have the option of specifying criteria in a variety of fields, title, author, publisher. A word and a synopsis. If you want books that contain images, you can select that. Also, many of our books with images have audible image descriptions. So if you know that you want to have that audible image description for your students, you can check that and the search will only bring up books that have those image descriptions built into that, into the metadata. There's books in a variety of languages. So we have the language dropdown, Spanish is our second largest collection next to English. I believe there's 65,000 books in Spanish. Again, books for all ages. So if you're supporting a student who reads in another language. You can select books in their native language And then here the grade You can filter by, it says all grades or then pre-kindergarten, kindergarten, one, two, three, you know, all the way up to college levels, graduate, postgraduate, adult education. So if you are searching, let's see, I'll put in pre-kindergarten And I'll say, you know, books about animals for the pre-kindergarten ages. And I hit the advanced search button It should just pull up any of those early readings. So I got 23 books that were pre-K about animals. Are you my mother? So that would be one way if you're looking for the the really young kids who are not yet in kindergarten. So also on this advanced search page, there are A lot of different categories where you can, you know, if you're just looking, you know, your student likes mystery or science fiction, you can select books on that because again. Bookshare is for the books they need for school. But also books that people would want to read for pleasure. The browse link is the third way to search for books. This takes you to book collections that are put together by the Bookshare collections team. They update these frequently. There's a New York Times fiction and nonfiction bestsellers. As these are updated in the New York Times, our team looks to see what books in the collection we have of those titles. And then adds them to these special collection books, popular teen and kids. So this is a good page to get a sense The breadth of the collection. Also, if you're just looking for books that you think your students might think were fun to read, great place to come get ideas for kids, for teens. Books for educators, there's books listed to the different Lexile levels or leveled readers for kids with maybe reading, decoding or reading comprehension problems. Books for adults. So it's just another place to come to look for books. So I'm just going to go to, here's our Newberry award winners, which is for American Literature for children When you click on the book title, select that title, there's a synopsis about the book. Each book has this book detail page say this is the book you want to assign to your student, all you have to do is hit there's a assign button. That will pull up the member roster. So due to the copyright law, every book has to be associated with a qualified person. So even if you want every student of yours to read the same book. You can select the, there's a select all box and you hit the assign button and then that book is immediately assigned to all the students or you can select one, two, or three. And then when they log in with their username and password, they would have immediate access to the book. So that would be if your student is going to read in the books are reader for web or on a mobile device. Nothing to download. You're just assigning it and then they will access and stream the book. There are times you will want to download the file format or a braille device, or you want the actual audio file, there's a download button. I would select the download button. Again, it pulls up the member roster. You select the students that you want to assign the book to. And in this table here for all the students, there's a download format column. So if you have set the default download format for a student. It will be, that's what's visible here. So say for your student i need a book You selected Daisy with images. So it's automatically there every time you assign a book. Let's say today, you know, she's going to listen to it. She just wants the you can still change it. So even though it's a default, you're not limited to that. So now you want to download an audio file of this book for the student. There's a prepare books button The system is just asking you confirm your list of members who will receive the title You can edit it if you're suddenly remembered, oh. I also need that book for the other student. You can do that there. You hit confirm and then the system begins kind of in the back end processing the file You'll see this My History page. And the status field when it will show that it's processing while it's formatting and then it will say available. You're now available to access the file. I did, you know, for Anita, I did the mb3 you can select the available link And it will show you that that will download the file to wherever downloads go onto your computer. Usually it's the downloads file. And it does download a zipped Folder. So you just have to unzip it and extract the way you would do with any zip file and then you'll have just the mp3 files. Some of our audio mp3 books It's just one long. Others have it divided up by chapter. And then you could, however you want to get those files to the student, you can email them, you can put them on a Google Drive for them to download. Just, you know, whatever works best, transferring it to their device So that would be how you would download for the student. Through our system, if you actually do need the file. So.

>>Mary Ann Mendez: Also, just to add here. Same with Word documents. Some books will be individual single files. Other books will be divided by chapters. So when you unzip those When you unzip those folders or bundles of files. It really depends on how the the book ended up being processed. So that can vary as well. And so when you have those multiple files like MP3s and or Word documents Rather than a single file like an EPUB or another or brf Sometimes it can literally be helpful to get that content onto a device like a braille display that has a thumb drive option, what have you, literally to copy that content. To a thumb drive. And then if you are familiar with how to get that content transferred to that device via thumb drive. Most of the displays will allow you to plug in a thumb drive. Because you have multiple files. It sometimes can just be great to copy that folder over and then use a thumb drive and bring those files into the display. Oh, by opening them as you need them.

>>Lara Rondberg: Yeah, good point. Thanks, Marianne. So now I have gone, I've logged in again on Bookshare.org as a student. And this is a student who is just on their school account. So they come to their My Bookshare page And there is an assigned books tab. And that will show all their books that have been assigned to them. And these books, say the teacher assigns all the books at the beginning of the year that the student will need to read, they just stay under this tab. They don't disappear. And the student, you tell them. I want you to read this title or that title and they can come here and choose how they want to read it. So for a student, maybe just with low vision and can see print if it's enlarged, they might come here and they say they have a Chromebook that their district has given them. They can just select this read now button And the book opens in the browser, no files to download. It's just pulling it down from the cloud. There is a settings icon, settings tab where they can adjust the look and feel to make it work for them. So they can choose the voice and I am on a PC and I'm in the Edge browser. Microsoft now makes this line, they call them natural voices, but they only make it through their edge browser because they want you to they want to steal, you know. Business away from the Chrome browser. So it is showing me that in addition to the legacy voices that have been on PCs for years, they have these natural voices so I can Select the voice, play a little sample to hear if it sounds good to me. Make the the speed slower or faster. Again, that's a very individual setting. Some people can listen really fast. Others do better slower. They can elect to have it voice the page numbers and image descriptions. On the text tab, they can adjust the text size. It goes up to 48 points. They can select the style, the font style. There's a variety of different you know common font formats that you see in Word and other digital materials so they can select whatever they like. They can adjust the character spacing, sometimes having more white space between the characters help. They can have it paginated where they're side by side facing pages or just scrolling one long scrolling text. They can adjust margins and they can adjust line spacing from one to three point to have, again, the more white space in between the letters. In between the lines. Which can benefit students with visual impairments for students with learning disabilities. Who sometimes have trouble tracking as they read. The white space is beneficial. So all the settings that are built into our reader are all based on, you know, kind of What the research shows us helps people access text, especially people with different print disabilities. And lastly, they can select different color and contrast, black text on white background. A black background with a light lemon text black on lemon, light blue. So a lot of different options that will work better for some students. Some people is a preference. Other people, it really helps them see and focus on the words. Set that up how they like. It does, the system highlights both the sentence and the word as it's being read out loud. So the whole sentence will be highlighted and then that word is highlighted as it's spoken. And there's a lot of Color options, and I think kids sometimes um It's fun for them to set that up. Can set that up. And then there's a play button to begin reading or they can double click There's also a table of contents. So if they're just starting the book. They can go to where they went to start. By selecting the table of contents. And so if they just want to start reading, I'm just going to Double click. There was a crunch of breaking China, he had trodden on a cup of cold tea that had been sitting on the floor outside his bedroom door. What the? He looked around, the landing of number four. So that's the synthesized text to speech, you know, reading the book out loud And for some people hearing it and being able to see the text is very, very helpful. It's certainly a very easy way to read. There's bookmarks. So while it's reading, if they select the bookmark icon. They can put a bookmark And then in the table of contents, there's a bookmarks tab where they can then, you know, when they return to the book the next day. They know where they are where they left off So that's the Bookshare Reader for Web, which works on any computer. But students can download the file on their own if they choose. And so they, on their My Bookshare page, it lists all the different formats available. And say the student wants to just listen to the book, they could download the audio. It would go directly to their computer or a Chromebook, and then they can just listen to it that way. Or if they want to download the BRF or a Word document and then transfer that To their device. They would just need to be taught how to do that and i think you know kids are pretty tech savvy. They learn pretty easily. Maybe they're going to download the file, save it to a flash drive, and then Connect that to their device, however they choose to read and the type of the device they have, how it and ingest materials. So they really are in control of how they're reading. If they are reading with a mobile app, they would just log into their Bookshare account directly onto that mobile app. So that, again, that's the Bookshare Reader for Web. Really easy to read. For both, I sponsor educators login and students. We have a help center. That they can navigate to the Help and Learning Center. It has links to frequently asked questions. These are some of the top questions that get asked over and over again. You select that link. How do I reset my password? It takes you just to a short help article. Explaining how to do that. You can also search by topic. Sign up, read books. Finding books. There's a Braille topic header. That will bring up all the different help articles related to reading in Braille. Here is one, how do I embossure books in Braille? That would have some of that information, as Marianne mentioned, about selecting the preferences, opening Duxbury So the Health and Learning Center is a great kind of first step in getting your answers to your questions. Easily but we do have our wonderful support team that you can contact or email. There is a contact us link on the Help and Learning Center main page. Where there's a contact form, you would put in your email This would be populated with your your name. Already, you're logged in as your teacher would have your name. You can select from the dropdown menu the topic of the question or select other and then type in your question that goes to our team. And then they'll respond either by email or phone, however the question came in. The phone is answered Monday through Friday, 5 a.m. To 5 p.m. Pacific time. And you can also leave a voicemail if they're busy or it's after hours. And then they will return your call. So the Help and Learning Center is a great place to come for answers to your questions. I know we're getting close to the end of the of our time. So Donna, if there's any other questions that have to go to now?

>>Donna: Yes, there are. If… Let's see, who was it? Joellen, if that run through of what the student sees is or you have a specific question from that. Let us know. Rosaba asked, how do I know if my district already has an account?

>>Lara Rondberg: Oh, great question.

>>Donna: That's the first part of her question. And then the second part of her question is can She registered her account as VI and then it had only her students. So I'm not quite sure

>>Lara Rondberg: Yeah, you know, again, since Bookshare is free, you know, there's nothing to even if a district admin says, we just want one Bookshare account for the district. There's nothing to stop someone from creating their own. When you want an account for something costs, you know, obviously a teacher you would have to get permission So we often do see duplicate accounts. We have districts who have one, they have a VI specific account and then an account for the students with learning or physical conditions, they prefer to have it Others have everyone on one account. It's really what works best for you. So if you're just supporting, you have a caseload You could create an account for the students that you serve. There's nothing to prevent you. And we do have, we find a lot of duplicate accounts because it's not really easy to know If the score district has an account. When you go to sign up. In the signup process, it will ask you for the name of your school or district. If you enter it and there's like a find my school lookup. It will say if there is one, they find a match. The system sees, okay, it's the same name in the same city. We think this is your score district. You could say, yes, that's my account and request access to that account. That sends a message to our team. They try to then reach out to the account holder and get that educator connected. The problem is sometimes these accounts have been dormant And it's not, and we can reach out to who is listed as the account Primary contact, but they might be long gone from the district and that account has just been sitting there So there can be a little back and forth. I would say maybe just reach out to the customer support team and ask and they can look it up and then help you get connected. That might save some time. For several years, we had a contract from the Texas Education Authority to have, we had three staff people who were on the ground in Texas that went around to districts and set up book share accounts. Three of them cover the whole state. They traveled all around. So chances are that most schools or districts do have an account It might have been dormant for many years. So that funding ended a while ago, I think right around When the pandemic started. So it could be that some of those, so there might be that account It exists already. It's just a matter of getting it updated. So I would say reach out to the team And then if there is an account, it's easy to create a new one. But instead of trying to reinvent the wheel to get connected and we have a process of getting people connected to the accounts and making sure they have permission to be added to the account by reaching. We get them to have a form signed. By the principal or vice principal or some other supervisor attesting that yes they have a legit you know they they are allowed to get the to join that account.