Amazon announces textbook rentals for Kindle

Textbooks are a major pain in many ways for college students. They are expensive, heavy, take up space, and don't always get used in the classroom. Some textbooks are very useful and students will keep them after the class is over, but many are done with a book once the class is done. Renting textbooks is a good option to save money.

Amazon has announced that textbooks can be rented for the Kindle at up to 80% off the full price. This is great news. Think about it - save money, carry your textbooks on your Kindle or tablet device (saving your back) and even annotate with notes. Amazon has stated that there are thousands of textbooks from major publishers available and that your annotations will be saved even after the rental has expired. You can access your notes at any time on the Kindle website or even in the book if you rent it again.

Pretty good news for college students!

Related Articles:

http://educationaltechnologyguy.blogspot.com/2009/06/textbook-resources-for-college-students.html
http://educationaltechnologyguy.blogspot.com/2011/03/guest-post-college-textbooks-and-etexts.html
http://educationaltechnologyguy.blogspot.com/2011/02/resources-to-replace-textbooks.html
http://educationaltechnologyguy.blogspot.com/2011/03/free-textbooks-online-download-ipad.html
http://educationaltechnologyguy.blogspot.com/2011/06/150-free-textbooks-great-list-of-great.html

g.co - Google's official shortcut for their sites

Google recently announced g.co as the official URL shortcut for official Google products and services. g.co will only link to webpages owned by Google and only Google can create the g.co shortcuts. This means that you can trust the shortened link.

This is good news for educators who want to use and share Google's many tools with their students or other educators. The short links will make it easier to share these great resources.

Google still has the public URL shortener  goo.gl available for the public to use.


Related Article:
My Top 10 Free Google Resources for Education

Livescribe Pen at ISTE

I reviewed my Livescribe smart pen in a previous post. I really like it. It records what you write (on special paper you can buy or print out your own) and audio. It's great for taking notes. I brought mine, with a 5 x 9" pad, with me to ISTE and took all my notes using it. The battery lasts forever and it was very easy to write with.

I also took audio recordings of parts of sessions. The audio recordings are linked to my written notes also, which makes it easy to review the audio recordings with your written notes. I also sent a couple of the notes to email and Evernote for follow up use. I find that I can take better notes using a pen and paper because I can use symbols and create drawings.

I noticed many people had iPads and laptops with them and were using them, but many were also looking for outlets to charge them up throughout the day. If the HP TouchPad had been released by then (I will be reviewing it shortly - I love it!) I would have brought it with me, but the Livescribe smart pen was even better for a couple of reasons.

1 - small and lightweight
2 - battery lasts for days
3 - we went out to lunch and dinner and saw the sights. We were able to keep the notepad and Livescribe smartpen in our small bag and not worry about it getting banged around on the bus, or wet on the Duck tours, or targeted for theft.
4 - Notes synced and backed up as soon as I connected it to my laptop at the hotel.
5 - 3 days of conference notes only used about 5GB out of 8GB of memory.

It was extremely useful and easy to use. Check one out.