3 Places to Find Online Children's Audio Books

This week I'm taking a few days off to ski, play with my dogs, visit with friends and family, and generally recharge my batteries. If you're on vacation this week too, I hope that you're having a great vacation. While I'm away I'm rerunning the most popular posts of the year. The selections are based on pageviews during 2012.

This post is born out of a request for help from someone that I met at the Teacher 2 Teacher conference in Bow Island, Alberta. She was looking for some free online talking storybooks to use in her grade 1 class. I didn't have anything coming to mind right off, so I searched Diigo and my blog archives to find these three places to find and free online talking children's storybooks.

MeeGenius is a nice source of free and paid ebooks for kids. There are lots of sites that offer the same thing as MeeGenius but MeeGenius distinguishes itself with one excellent feature. That feature is automatic word highlighting to accompany the narration of each book. When children open the ebooks online, on an Android tablet, or on an iPad they can choose to have the story read to them or to read the story on their own. When the story is read to them each word in the story is highlighted on the page. This should help children follow along with the story.

The Woodlands Junior School is a school website based in the UK. I've previously featured their site as a good place to find educational games for elementary age students. In my search yesterday, I discovered that they also have a nice collection of links to free online talking storybooks.

Magic Keys is another site with a good collection of talking picture books for children. Magic Keys seemed a bit tricky to navigate at first so I would recommend that you use it to find storybooks for your students rather than sending your students to the site on their own.

I know there are a lot of good iPad and Android apps for talking storybooks, but web-based versions are a little more elusive. If you have a site that should be added to this list, please leave a comment.

StoryCove - A World of Stories

Occasionally, I revisit some of my old posts to check up on resources that I reviewed and see what has happened with those resources since I wrote my review. One example of this is Story Cove which I reviewed two years ago and revisited this morning.

Story Cove is a service that hosts audio and video stories based on the folktales from a variety of places and cultures. The stories are divided by their continent of origin. Each story is intended to convey a lesson on culture and society. The stories can be watched as videos or listened to as audio-only recordings.

Applications for Education
Story Cove provides a nice selection of lesson plans to accompany each of the stories in its collection. The lesson plans are in PDF form and include handouts for students. The lesson plans are categorized by story and by grade level, pre-K through grade 3. Story Cove also provides printable activities like mazes and word searches to accompany each story.

AudioLiterate - Stream and Download Audiobooks

AudioLiterate is a new website offering free and paid audiobooks that you can listen to online or download to listen to on your favorite device. You can locate audiobooks on AudioLiterate according to author, genre, price, or title. The free audiobooks can be streamed chapter by chapter directly from AudioLiterate. The free audiobooks come from public domain sources.

Applications for Education
If you're looking for some audiobooks to support your students' reading of classics like Tom Sawyer, Aesop's Fables, or Treasure Island, AudioLiterate could be a great resource to bookmark.

Here are some other good sources of free audiobooks that I've reviewed:
Books Should Be Free
Lit 2 Go
Open Culture's audiobook collection
Open Library
MeeGenius 

Thought Audio - Free Audio Books

Thought Audio is a producer and provider of free audio books featuring classic titles across a variety of genres. Thought Audio audio books are professionally narrated works that you can listen to online or download to play offline. The library of audio books on Thought Audio contains some titles that are hard to find as audio files. For example you'll find titles like Thus Spoke Zarathustra, The Life of PT Barnum, and The Madman. You'll also find more commonly read titles like Alice in Wonderland, and Poe's The Raven.

Applications for Education
Thought Audio could be a good resource for reading and literature teachers in search of audio recordings to assist their students.

Here are some related items that may be of interest to you:
Seven Places to Find Free eBooks
Audio Owl - Hundreds of Free Audio Books
Free Audio Books from Books Should Be Free

Free Audio Books from Books Should Be Free

Books Should Be Free is a provider of free audio books. Books Should Be Free hosts hundreds of free audio books in a wide range of genres. All of the audio books in the collection are either public domain or Creative Commons works. All of the audio books can be downloaded directly from Books Should Be Free and or iTunes.

One of the aspects of Books Should Be Free that I think some students will really appreciate is the large display of book covers that they'll see when browsing by genre. It's true that we should teach students not to judge a book by its cover, yet at the same time a good cover might get students interested in books they would otherwise ignore.

Applications for Education
If you have a student in need of an audio book to support their reading, Books Should Be Free could be a good place to start your search.

Here are some related items that may be of interest to you:
Seven Places to Find Free eBooks
Guys Read - Getting Boys to Read
AdLit - Strategies for Teaching Adolescent Literature

Audio Owl - Hundreds of Free Audio Books

Audio Owl is a great service for locating and listening to free audio books. Audio Owl catalogs public domain recordings of books that are in the public domain. Because the recordings are in the public domain anyone is free to download, listen to, and share the recordings. Audio Owl has arranged hundreds of recordings into an easy-to-browse collection. You can browse the collection by genre or search by title, author, or keyword. If you choose to browse by genre, Audio Owl presents all of the titles in a visually appealing display of book covers.

Applications for Education
Quite a few of the literature and reading teachers that I work with use audio recordings to support struggling readers. Often they are searching all over the web for audio recordings. Now, when they ask, I'll direct them to Audio Owl as the first place to look for free audio books.

Here are some related items that may be of interest to you:
Seven Places to Find Free eBooks
Guys Read - Getting Boys to Read
AdLit - Strategies for Teaching Adolescent Literature

LoudLit - Listen to Books and Read Along

LoudLit.org is a good place to find free audio recordings of famous works of literature. Many websites do this, but what makes LoudLit unique and useful for teachers is the option of reading the text online while listening to the reading of the text.

Applications for Education
LoudLit is a great resource for teachers of struggling readers. Students can use LoudLit to follow along with the reading of a text. Have students use individual computers to progress at their own pace.

Here are some related items that may be of interest to you:
Learn Out Loud
More than 250 Free Audio Books
Lit 2 Go - Audio Stories

Teachers Get 25% Discount at Borders This Weekend

Looking for something to do Friday evening? Head down to your local Borders bookstore for a "special reception" to kick off educator appreciation week at Borders. From March 19th through the 25th Borders is giving current and retired teachers a 25% discount on just about everything in stock. Click here to read all of the details.

Clarification: The discounts do start today, however, the reception is Friday evening, not Thursday evening. The wording of my original post may have caused some confusion over that point. I apologize for the confusion I may have caused.

Lit 2 Go - Audio Stories

Lit 2 Go is a part of Florida's Educational Technology Clearinghouse. Lit 2 Go offers a large selection of fiction stories and poems available as free downloads. I didn't count the number of selections, but the total appears be at least 200 titles. The collection can be searched by author or title.

Applications for Education
Lit 2 Go provides a nice collection of audio books and poems that teachers can use to accompany in-classroom reading.

For more audio book resources, please visit the following related resources:
Learn Out Loud
Open Culture - More Than 250 Audio Book Titles
Speakaboos - Fables, Nursery Rhymes, and More

More Than 250 Free Audio Books

Open Culture, which I've written about numerous times in the past, has updated their collection of free audio books. The collection now includes more than 250 fiction and non-fiction books. The contents of the collection is quite impressive as it includes works by, among others, Austen, Dickens, Melville, Poe, Voltaire, and Rousseau. All of the audio books can be played on your computer or mp3 player.

Applications for Education
This audio book collection has a lot of material that is suitable for high school students. The audio books could be a useful supplement to the reading your students are doing. Audio books can also be a helpful aid for struggling readers.

Here are some other useful resources from Open Culture that I've shared in the past.
Hemingway Animated
Old School Meets New School on iTunes U
Challenge Your Students With One of These...

Speakaboos - Listen to Fables, Nursery Rhymes, And More

I meant to post this yesterday, but I got caught up in my excitement about Soup.io and forgot to post it.

Speakaboos is a website where children can listen to celebrities reading fables, nursery rhymes, fairy tales, lullabies, and more. The list of celebrity readers includes Kelly Ripa, Clay Aiken, and Kevin Bacon along with twelve others. Children can listen and watch animated versions of their favorite stories for free on the Speakaboos website. Parents and teachers that would like a permanent copy of the recordings for use offline can purchase downloads. 15% of all revenue from downloads purchased goes to the NEA's Creative Coalition.

Applications for Education
Speakaboos provides story guides, worksheets, and art projects that teachers can use the classroom. You and your students can also create your own Speakaboos recordings.

Learn Out Loud - Audio Books and More

Learn Out Loud has gathered together a collection of over 2500 free audio books and other educational audio and video files. Learn Out Loud's collection includes readings of famous literature as well as audio and video files of famous speeches and news reports. The collection is sorted into sixteen categories which can then be sorted alphabetically or by popularity.

Applications for Education
Learn Out Loud's collection of free audio books can be used to make difficult texts more accessible to struggling readers. Learn Out Loud has files suitable for students in every grade from Kindergarten through high school. The Lit2Go selections on Learn Out Loud are specifically targeted toward elementary school and middle school students. Lit2Go features readings of common children's literature.

Learn Out Loud's collection of audio recordings of famous speeches can help to bring history alive for students. Learn Out Loud also features some free videos that history teachers will find make a nice supplement to their instruction.

Free Technology For Teachers: Open Culture Audio Books

Open Culture is a website that I read fairly regularly. The Podcast collection on Open Culture has a good list of audio books available for free download. If the book you're looking for isn't on Open Culture chances are you'll find it in one of the links to other audio book collections at the bottom of Open Culture's list. Check out the list here.