Ella Claire Baker

Ella Claire Baker is a writer from Troy, Alabama. She has a passion for literature of every form, but she has a special affection for epic poetry and Greek mythology. She also finds the practice of law, especially family law, to be fascinating.

Technology and Teaching Poetry

Poetry is a difficult subject to entice students to immerse themselves in. Poetry is often neglected throughout elementary and high school, as well as in teacher-education courses entirely. Digital poetry can be taught in so many unique ways that cannot be done with an old poetry textbook. Allowing students to find and create poems that resonate with them encourages students to discover the diversity of poetry. The accessibility for digital poetry is at an all-time high, as is every form of digital media. Most schools in America issue their students electronic devices. At this rate, digital poetry is significantly more accessible than paper format.

Audiobook Poetry for Children

Poetry and audiobooks are two terrific resources for children learning to read. Poetry is a literary form that emphasizes language structures in unique ways to connect lines inside a poem. Poetry frequently rhymes, which is an excellent approach to improving phonemic awareness. Phonemic awareness is the capacity to perceive and control sounds in language through writing. Children learn to break words down into phonemes through rhyming, which strengthens their decoding and comprehension skills. Poetry introduces children to new words, enhancing their vocabulary. Reading longer materials might be challenging for a new reader. On the other hand, poetry presents concise texts that are rich in significance. Additionally, poetry’s frequent use of metaphors enables more nuanced readings of the material. Children learn to become more self-assured, independent thinkers because poetry allows for personal interpretation. 

The benefits of audiobooks for new readers are very similar to that of poetry. Students can hear the precise letter sounds and word-forming letter patterns through audiobooks. In addition to increasing vocabulary, understanding, and critical thinking abilities, audiobooks encourage student interaction with the material and expose them to a wider variety of terms. Students who listen to audiobooks are exposed to academic jargon and book language. Their previous knowledge, a crucial element for a developing student, is built through exposure. Audiobooks also promote the growth of higher-order thinking abilities. Combining these two resources for new readers could make a significant difference in children’s reading skills and their appreciation for poetry as they get older.

Digital Poetry vs. Poetry Textbooks

Students are only exposed to a narrow variety of poetry styles, subjects, and writers since teachers rely on overly well-known poems and ways of studying them. Handing a student a poetry textbook comprised entirely of the same authors and the same kinds of poetry is dull and uninspiring. Poetry textbooks have been done to death and can be listed as a contributing factor to students’ distaste for the writing medium.

A study called “The Transpoemation Project” chose a group of ninth graders to explore digital poetry with. They gave these students a project where they wrote their own poem, took it from pages to devices, and then transformed their poem into a movie. The students’ knowledge that they were going to make a short film of their poem allowed them to be more creative with their uses of themes and language. Translating a poem from the page to the screen highlighted the importance of analyzing their work. The same poem was read by various students in different ways, and the aesthetic decisions creators made when utilizing technology to animate the poem encouraged the other students to experience the ‘filmmaker’s’ interpretation of the text.

 Poetry inspires us to consider how to use the various multimedia tools at our disposal to increase students’ comprehension and appreciation. Students must use creativity, critical thinking, problem-solving skills, and interact with a poem multiple times to translate verse from the page to the screen. It would have been impossible for the students in this study to complete this project without extensively re-reading their poems. This repetitive reading exercise improved understanding and aided interpretation.

Poetry Appreciation

Poetry is becoming near extinct in education as a whole. Even when poetry is taught, most teachers do not feel confident in teaching it. They resort to picking apart similar themes and never exposing students to anything new. Implementing technology into teaching poetry could be very influential. Translating a poem from the page to the screen and then taking it further and animating the poetry brings it to life. Projects similar to “The Transpoemation Project” have the potential to make learning poetry more enjoyable and influential. The ninth graders who participated in that study are sure to, at the very least, remember how fun their experience was. The potential of audiobook poetry to introduce children to it at a young age could create a lifelong appreciation for poetry. A new age of technology has ushered in new ways of teaching nearly everything. So why should poetry be an exception?

Speechify for Authors and Editors

Have you ever been editing your content to find that the words are running together in your head? Authors and editors alike analyze and re-read texts repeatedly to weed out mistakes, and after time your brain can become overwhelmed. Reading the text aloud to see how the words flow is a tactic many people in these fields utilize. Speechify makes it possible for you to hear your writing aloud rather than reading it yourself, which makes it simpler for your mind to focus on seeing errors that are directly in front of you.

What Speechify is

Speechify is a multi-platform program using artificial intelligence (AI) voices to translate text into speech. The HD voices are one of the best features Speechify has to offer. From a distance, you can easily hear the voices, and you can alter the voice to suit your requirements. You can alter the reading’s pitch, tone, loudness, speed, and more. Instead of having to read the grammatical and readability errors yourself, you simply hear them. The ability to highlight the text while it is being read to you is another noteworthy feature. You can follow along with the text while highlighting the areas that require further attention as well as take notes within the software. Speechify also supports many languages. If you’d like, you can even translate across languages. The best part about Speechify is that it is a free program. There are premium features, but you can try them out for free first to see if you like them before deciding to pay for everything.

Competitors

Natural Reader and Murf are two large competitors for Speechify. With Natural Reader, you can turn written content from websites, ebooks, Word and PDF documents, and other types of written text into speech. There are 56 voices currently available in nine different languages, including American English, British English, French, Spanish, German, Swedish, Italian, Portuguese, and Dutch. Natural Reader has a free plan as well.

Murf is Speechify’s largest competitor if you are looking for a tool to assist with your proofreading. Murf is not free, but it has a wide range of plans available. There are three different pricing options: Basic, Pro, and Enterprise. A full set of AI tools are included with Murf. If you don’t think you have the correct tone or accent for a piece of audio content but would prefer not to use a voice actor, there is even a Voice Changer tool that allows you to record something before it is changed into an AI-generated voice. Time Syncing, Grammar Assistant, and Voice Editing are additional capabilities. Having a grammar-assisting tool within the software is what makes Murf such a threat to Speechify. Although, as an author or editor just looking to have your work read back to you, this may not be worth spending money on when there are free applications.

What Makes Speechify More Useful to Authors and Editors

There are many text-to-speech applications on the market. What sets Speechify apart is its free plan. They offer a 3-day free trial of everything they offer. Moreover, the highlighting and note-taking features within Speechify are ideal features for editing. With free grammar assisting tools such as Grammarly available, the need for a grammar assistant within a text-to-speech application is not necessarily needed. As an author or editor, all you need is Speechify’s free plan to significantly improve the quality of your work. Hearing the way the words flow and being able to point out mistakes that way can make all the difference. The note-taking and highlighting tools are certainly useful and make the premium plan worth it, but besides that, the voices are the only other thing that might entice you to purchase the premium plan. They have a wide array of voices available. Celebrity voices are mimicked on Speechify as well, which can be incredibly entertaining. However, for editing what sets Speechify apart is the fact that authors and editors get everything they need out of it for free.

Downsides to Speechify

You would assume that by purchasing the premium plan you would have unlimited access to all of the features Speechify has to offer. With premium voices, speechify has a cap of 150,000 words each month. You can only hear the typical voices after you reach that limit. If you are an author or editor who already does not necessarily need the premium option but bought it for the voice options, this could be potentially frustrating. Also, with the standard version, the user experience may be hampered by the pushy ads intended to persuade you to upgrade to the premium plan. 

Overall Assessment

Speechify is simple to use and a great tool for revision. Yet aggressive advertising can be irritating for users of any app, and this one is no exception.  The note-taking and highlighting features on the premium plan are quite helpful, and the voice options might be amusing. Although those tools can be useful, they aren’t absolutely necessary for text editing. So, overall, as an author or editor using this to weed out mistakes in your work, the free plan gives you what you need, a second voice reading your work back to you.

AI Writing Detectors Save the Day

Soon after the release of the new ChatGPT bot, Professor Darren Hicks caught two students in the act of AI-giarism. The term “AI-giarism” refers to the practice of presenting content written by artificial intelligence (AI) as your own. Hicks claimed that he became concerned when the student submitted an essay that was on subject but contained some well-written false information. He ran it through an AI detector, which determined that the piece was 99% likely produced by AI. As AI technology develops, this practice is becoming more and more common. As a result of situations like this with students, ChatGPT has caused controversy in academia. Fear not, several organizations have constructed AI writing detectors to weed out AI-giarism and save the day for teachers.

GPT-2 Output Detector 

The GPT-2 Output Detector is a tool created by OpenAI. Even though this software was created for the more outdated GPT-2 bot, it is still quite good at pointing out ChatGPT’s outputs. In fact, Darren Hicks used this software to confirm his suspicions. The detector will provide you with its conclusion a few seconds after you paste in the text you want to study. However, this program is more compatible with shorter literature that is less than 1,000 characters long. To ascertain whether a piece of writing was created by AI, this software delivers a proportion of a “real” to “fake” ratio. The only version of this tool that is accessible online is a demo, which is free. However, as ChatGPT develops further, this software will become much less useful.

Giant Language Model Test Room

The Harvard Natural Language Processing Group and the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab collaborated to create the Giant Language Model Test Room (GLTR). This software focuses on a piece of writing’s complexity, assessing how likely a word is to be used. If the term is among the top 10 most likely options, it will be highlighted in green. Yellow highlights the top 100 words likely to be used, while red underlines the top 1,000. A word that is more unlikely to be used than that is highlighted violet. The majority of words in most written works will be highlighted in green, but because human writings are a lot less predictable than AI texts, they will also frequently contain a lot of words that are yellow, red, and even violet. However, the online version of GLTR was created in 2019, making it less reliable with the advancement of current ChatGPT outputs. 

GPT Zero

Edward Tian, a senior at Princeton University, developed GPT Zero. The only model that is free online is an older beta model, although Tian has been working on a new model. GPT Zero measures the randomness in sentences and the randomness of the text as a whole. Human writing almost always contains more random content than text produced by AI because we tend to use words and sentence structures that are less predictable. As a result, an AI likely created the text if GPTZero detects low levels of randomness.

AI Writing Check

AI Writing Check is a completely free service created with educators in mind by two nonprofit organizations, Quill.org and Commonlit.org. They created AI Writing Check to make it possible for teachers to determine whether a piece of writing submitted by a student was written by ChatGPT. It allows teachers (or anybody else) to copy and paste text and in a matter of seconds learn whether the material was created using ChatGPT. However, you must divide the content into distinct sections to check responses longer than 400 words. Based on testing with 15k essays, they believe this tool is 80–90% correct most of the time. Nevertheless, they have advised teachers to use caution while utilizing this tool to look for academic dishonesty because of potential errors. They have described AI Writing Check as a band-aid solution that teachers can employ this academic year until more sophisticated AI detection technologies become publicly accessible.

AI Text Classifier

AI Text Classifier was created by none other than the creators of ChatGPT. On January 31st, OpenAI launched AI Text Classifier, which is user-friendly while still maintaining accuracy. All you have to do is enter at least 1,000 characters (about 150–250 words) of text into the box and press the submit button. The paper is then marked as highly unlikely, unlikely, unclear if it was created by AI, probably, or likely by AI. Users receive $18.00 of credit as a sort of free trial, and it lasts for around four months before expiring. After that, you pay for what you use. Prices depend on how many “tokens” are used. Tokens can be compared to bits of text, with 1,000 tokens equaling roughly 750 words. There are numerous models offered, Davinci being the most powerful, and Ada the fastest. 

Application In the Classroom

Finding a detector for your classroom, or for anywhere else, might be a challenging choice with so many options available. Cost is a factor to be taken into consideration. Free software is still useful to some extent, but the best technology available will never be offered for free. Teachers must remember to exercise caution when using open-source software to uncover academic dishonesty because these programs are never entirely accurate. Regardless, these programs can be very helpful in catching an essay produced by an AI.

Is Kitaboo the Right Fit for Your Business?

Kitaboo is an interactive eBook reader app as well as a publishing site. Whether you are a businessman needing a professional corporate memo or a teacher trying to create a curriculum you can publish and distribute your material through the Kitaboo Digital Publishing and Distribution Platform. Kitaboo markets itself as the best option for corporations, publishers, and institutions for their content delivery and distribution needs because of its user-friendly design, easy access to material, and individualized reading experience. In all reality though, what makes Kitaboo different from its competitors? What would make it more, or less, compatible with your business?

Positive aspects of Kitaboo

Digital Rights Management is one contribution Kitaboo makes that its competitors do not seem to have. They make sure that the content you upload on their site remains solely yours. Kitaboo allows you to digitize any print document and add multimedia to it, such as audio, video, and photographs. Even enhanced documents can be published onto many platforms (iOS, Android, Windows) and multiple devices (smartphones, tablets, and PCs). Kitaboo provides thorough analytics of your reader’s content consumption habits. Kitaboo offers tools for companies seeking to enhance their work and digital distribution, including small companies still figuring out their brands, and larger ones with slipping analytics.

Competitors

A few of the players in this market include Joomag, Readz, Zmags, and Magloft. All share the same interactive features as Kitaboo except Magloft.  Zmags, on the other hand, caters specifically to magazines, giving them a much more specialized experience for those businesses as well as a smaller audience to work with. The small and agile team of Magloft, with only ten employees, may not be a suitable fit for larger companies. However, they are perfect for small publishers who want that hands-on experience.

Where Kitaboo and other services digitally distribute your work, Readz just gives you an easy experience in converting, editing, or enhancing your documents. For businesses that are well-known and don’t require assistance in reaching their audiences, this is a terrific resource. Joomag is the most similar to Kitaboo and therefore, one of their biggest competitors.

Price Difference

Pricing is the primary distinction between Kitaboo and Joomag. Joomag’s pricing structure and list of features for each plan are fairly rigid. You can upload PDF files, make links, and add images, sound, and even video to your digital magazine in the free edition. The Silver Plan, which costs $15.95 per month, comes with branding, selling memberships, and no ads. With the $39.95/month Gold Plan, readers may browse your magazines directly on mobile devices without the need for an app thanks to HTML5 for Mobile, Native iOS and Android Support, Native iPad Support, Multi-User Accounts, and other capabilities. The most expensive and complete option is the Platinum Plan, which incorporates CRM, mass mailing, and multi-branding services for $95.95/month. Kitaboo’s pricing requires an estimate that varies based on the project. You must get in touch with them to let them know what you need, and they will then create a proposal for you based on those needs. Depending on your perspective, the absence of upfront costs may be a disadvantage.

What To Choose

At the end of the day, each of these resources offers valuable opportunities for a business. Finding the right one comes down to what your business needs and can afford. With all of the options out there, finding one tailored to fit what you need is not a difficult task. However, there is no doubt that enhancing abilities and conversion to each format is crucial for digital publishing in general. There are various solutions available to you whether you need to simplify that for yourself or your staff. As far as digital distribution goes, Kitaboo, Joomag, Zmagz, and Magloft are all great resources. It truly depends on what fits your company best.

Covid-19 and The Use of Digital Textbooks in Schools

The Covid-19 pandemic sparked a broad technical expansion across the United States, especially in the educational sector. Schools had to adjust to new means of reaching their pupils during the lockdown period. The phrase “digital education” refers to all aspects of online learning. In 2020, the digital education market for 2022 was projected to be worth over 243 billion U.S. dollars. Print textbook publishers, e-book sales, and the number of computers in classrooms are still being impacted by this.

Technology in Public Schools

The rate of technological adoption was dramatically accelerated by the Covid-19 outbreak. Computers were certainly available in the classroom before, but in much smaller numbers. Now, instead of schools having a few computers here and there, almost every student has been issued a device. Aine Givens reported that during the 2019-2020 academic year computers were only available to every student in 45% of schools. Schools were just starting to make the transition to remote learning, and many simply lacked the resources to do so. Since then, schools have evolved to reflect the changes, and these figures have dramatically increased. More recently, Kevin Bushweller stated that 90% of public schools surveyed said that each middle and high school student would have a digital device for the 2022–2023 academic year.

E-book Sales in Schools

During the peak of the pandemic, e-book and audiobook usage in the classroom reached an all-time high. The Sora student reading app reported an 80% increase from 2019 to 2020 in schools borrowing books from their service. This was nearly triple their numbers from 2019. Due to this exponential growth, in 2022, several state legislatures moved to do away with print textbooks entirely and make that switch to e-books. Texas, Indiana, Michigan, and California have already hopped on the bandwagon.

What This Means for Print Textbook Companies

Five companies largely dominate the textbook market: Pearson, McGraw-Hill Education, Scholastic, Cengage Learning, and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Jim Milliot reported that print book sales held up very well during 2020 and 2021. However, from 2021 to 2022 the sale of print books fell by 6.5%. People’s increased access to entertainment options and the lifting of COVID lockdowns were two major factors in this decline. Predominantly print textbook companies have made shifts to digital publishing to work around these growing changes. For example, Pearson started making their resources digital-first in 2019. Print textbooks are far from dying out entirely, but the threat is still there, and companies are preparing for it. For elementary and high school students, McGraw-Hill introduced Rise, a program to help educators identify and fill the learning gaps caused by the pandemic. Simon Allen, Ceo of McGraw-Hill commented on the digital shift in the market, and how they have overcome it:

“McGraw Hill’s strong performance over the past several months is a testament to the hard work and investment the company has made in digital learning solutions. Even as sales of print textbooks decline, McGraw Hill’s Higher Education digital business is growing at a rate that markedly outpaces that decline, thanks to our continued digital product expansion and our swift response to the demand for online learning brought on by the pandemic. By investing in smart, affordable, and accessible digital learning tools, we are leading the industry in meeting the shifting needs of educators and students as they navigate the current challenging education environment.”

Before long, print textbooks may phase out entirely, but textbook publishing companies continue to adapt and overcome each shift in the market.

Looking Forward

The world around us continues to enhance technologically with each passing day. Almost every high-school student has a computer, e-textbooks are becoming more prominent, and the standard for learning is rapidly changing. How will this affect student learning and development in years to come? Will print textbooks die off entirely? With all these questions hanging before us, we can be certain that wherever the market goes, companies will follow. Demand will be met with supply.