Are your students reading their email but not the novels you've assigned them? Well, fret no more! Mix some great literature into their inbox with DailyLit and you'll have them "reading out of the palm of your hands!" The creators of DailyLit provided a solution for a world that constantly checks its email but "checks-in" with great literature less frequently. You now have the tools to get your students reading novels in serialized daily installments, helping them to tackle the great works in manageable pieces.

DailyLit currently has over 800 free books and almost 600 of them are in the Classics category (with all the "usual suspects" that most High School English classes assign). So let's say that you've assigned Pride & Prejudice by Jane Austin. Simply direct your students to the DailyLit site where they can "subscribe" to the book. Sections of the book will then be emailed directly to their email accounts, where they can read them on a regular and consistent basis.

Many students can access their email on their cellphones, so the benefit of having your book on your phone alone is probably worth signing up for DailyLit. Students can control how often the emails will come to them, what time of day, and even how long the passages will be. (You as the teacher could assign your students to subscribe daily, with the longest passages, for instance). Pride & Prejudice comes in 146 installments, which clearly is too much. However, with each subscription you can choose how many installments to include in each email. At present, there are 3 settings: "normal" (which delivers 1 installment per email), "longer" (which delivers 2 installments per email) and "longest" (which delivers 4 installments per email). So by choosing the longest setting, Pride and Prejudice" will now come in about 36 installments. Also, in each email installment sent, the student can click a hyperlink that tells DailyLit to "send me the next installment immediately". Each email message is clearly marked with the installment numbers, so you can assign deadlines around these installments (i.e., "Read up to installment 56 by Friday."). Getting a daily email will help students remember to read and they can keep the emails coming by clicking for the next installments.

DailyLit books can be accessed directly from the website and can also be subscribed to by RSS feeds. Again, the student can click the "send me the next installment immediately" link to continue in the book without waiting for the next automatic send.

There are many contemporary books available at DailyLit besides the free classics and public domain books. Most of these have a fee associated, but readers can have a few sample installments sent before purchase. DailyLit accepts Visa, MasterCard, American Express, and PayPal for payment, and books are reasonably priced lower for the ebook versions.

DailyLit has forums provided for readers to "meet up" and discuss books, allows users to create booklists, rate books, post reviews, add books to a "To-Read" list, and provides each user with their own "homepage".

One of my favorite offerings from DailyLit are their "Wikipedia Tours". Subscribing to "Wikipedia Tour: Psychology", for instance, will provide students with 20 installments (free) with sections to study within the topic. So, in the first installment, "The History of Psychology" is presented with links from the contents on that page in Wikipedia. By clicking the link, the reader will be taken directly to the page in Wikipedia. The next installment in the Psychology Tour brings information about "Classical Conditioning," followed by the "Sigmund Freud" installment, and so on. This is a great way for readers to manage connected content within Wikipedia, and use it in a "textbook" manner.

Now that you've got your students used to reading books by email, send them over to the site DearReader.com. This is a great way for any reader to sample different books to find ones that they want to read for pleasure. At DearReader.com, users sign up by providing their zip code (in order to be linked to the closest participating Library), enter their email address, and choose which "reading clubs" they want to belong to. Everyday, Monday through Friday, 5 minutes worth of a new book will be sent via email. By the end of the week, readers will have sampled 2-3 chapters of a book and can decide if they want to track it down to finish reading it (easily done at the connected library). Each Monday, a new book will start.

So, fill your students' email boxes with literature -- both assigned and suggested -- and get them checking their email for more than just the latest gossip and spam!
 

Bob Sprankle has been a multi-age teacher in Wells, ME for 10 years and has served as the school's Technology Integrator for the past two years.

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