mlearning- Our Nook Adventure

This is actually a set of blogs by a middle school librarian. She writes about her adventure from the purchasing of the Nooks to having students use the Nook. They ordered 30 Nooks. The blogs start with the how she decided to purchase the Nooks over other e-readers.  The main reason she choose the Nook was because of the technical support that Barnes & Noble offered. However, purchasing the Nooks was not easy due to the fact that Barnes & Noble would not accept a purchase order to purchase the Nooks. Once the Nooks arrived they had to figure out a way to catalog the titles on each Nook. They were able to use the same account for five Nooks, so if you bought a book for one then it would be on all five under that account. This made it a little easier for them to catalog the titles. There was lots of learning curves in this series of blogs. Some of these were that the Nook had to be on to charge, you must have a credit card on file during the entirety of the download process,and that you must have a credit card on file that has enough credit on to cover the purchase even if you are using a gift card to purchase the books. One disadvantage is that each time a book was purchased they had to reenter the credit card information because they had to delete it each time so that students would not access to this information. They had trouble purchasing titles because there school credit card could only have a certain number of charges each month and Barnes & Noble billed each book separately which would put them over there number of purchases for the month. Over all it was worth all the hassle, because the students loved them and read more. Another benefit was that they could make a more customized list for each student.

I found this blog very informative. I would not have thought of many of the issues that had to be worked out to get and use the Nooks. You would have thought that Barnes & Noble would have some sort of educational department to work with schools to make it easier for schools to purchase the Nooks. I do not like that you have to have a credit card on file to use a gift card. Also you would think that Barnes & Noble would offer educators a discount when purchasing the Nooks and books for the Nook. The only negative of having the Nooks is that they had to stay at school. This would mean that your lesson plans would have to be something that the students could get done at school. I really like that you could some what customize the Nook to the student that was using it.