Looking for texts accessible online? These e-text sites contain thousands of unbound texts. Anne of Green Gables, The Blue Fairy Book, Animal Farm, all of Mark Twain's writing? It's on there. Bonus: you can grab the vocabulary from any of these texts using VocabGrabber. 

• Project Gutenberg
• eBooks@Adelaide 

Teachers, these sites should help you find something good for the youngest to the most advanced readers in your classroom.  Continue reading...

Apple has just patented page turning. On Nov. 13, 2012, the U. S. Patent and Trademark Office granted Apple patent no. D670,713s for a "display screen or portion thereof with animated graphical user interface." In plain English, that's a page turner®.  Continue reading...

A publisher of digital textbooks has announced a utility that will tell instructors whether their students are actually doing the assigned reading. Another exciting example of interactive, digital education? Or a new way to snoop on students outside the classroom?  Continue reading...

The Oxford English Dictionary has long relied on "the wisdom of the crowds" to build a comprehensive historical record of English words and phrases back to their origins. The dictionary's latest experiment in crowdsourcing is "OED Appeals," an online initiative to engage the public in finding "antedatings," or citations that predate the earliest known examples in the OED files.  Continue reading...

Here's a project we can get behind: Mysteries of Vernacular, which presents etymological stories behind common words via beautiful papercraft animation. One word per letter of the alphabet is planned: so far they've finished assassin, clue, hearse, and pants. Check 'em out.