Tar Heel Reader

This afternoon we exceeded 100,000 books read at Tar Heel Reader! I’ve done my best to filter search engine spiders and bots out of these numbers so I believe these books were read by people.

Other statistics include:

• As of this posting there were 1454 books on the site with about 90 added each week.
• Books have been read by over 9,500 different computers in 59 countries worldwide.
• Our computers have responded to 7.3 million requests totaling more than 64 gigabytes of data.

If you click on the caption on a book page when speech is enabled, it will read the caption again. This should also work on the questions at the top of pages like “What do you want to do now?”

Thanks to Dinell and Gretchen for the suggestion.

Most of our campus was dark for several hours today after a failure at a power substation. Tar Heel Reader was down all afternoon. Everything except downloading slide shows appears to be working. I’ll restart the computer that handles those downloads tomorrow morning.

There is some bug in the book wizard that occasionally causes an error message when you try to save. I get an automatic error report when this happens and I have seen it happen to a couple of you. I made some changes today that I hope will cure the problem and I improved the error reports so I can learn more about what is happening if not.

My current theory is that it is related to saving your book after a picture search that has not yet completely finished updating all the little preview pictures, perhaps because of network slowness. If you see this problem, wait about 15 seconds or so for things to settle down and try saving again.

Also, as always when using computers, the best advice is to save early and often.

I apologize for the difficulty this has caused some of you.

Sometimes those tiny pictures you get in the book writing wizard are pretty hard to see. Wouldn’t you love to be able to see how your book will look before you publish it? And those of you whose students are writing books, wouldn’t you like to let them see their book but keep it in draft status so you can edit it for spelling and grammar later?

Well now you can. In the book wizard you’ll notice we have added a Preview button. Press it while you’re working on a book and it will first save your work as a draft and then pop up a new window with a preview of how your book will look when published. When you’re done previewing the book, click the Return to Editing link (or simply close the window) and you’ll go back to the book wizard where you left off.

Give it a try and let us know what you think.

I just made a small change to the picture search you use to find pictures on Flickr. Previously it had found pictures that had ANY of the tags you provided. Now it finds pictures that have ALL the tags. This is what I intended all along but I got it wrong in the Flickr API. Now it is fixed.

So, suppose you’re looking for a picture of an apple still on the tree. The comma separated tags apple,tree,leaves finds a good selection of relevant pictures.

Another example. If I search for blue bike (note no comma) I get 4 pages of pictures. If I search for blue,bike (note the comma) I get 118 pages of pictures. The first query requires a single tag with the words blue bike in that order. The second query requires the tag blue and the tag bike in any order.

I squared up the links in the lower left and right of the page when reading to make them easier for mouse users to hit. Let me know what you think of this change.

I have installed a completely rewritten editor for creating books. It looks just about exactly like the old one so hopefully you won’t be distracted by the changes unless they make your life better. It it looks much different then I’ve introduced some bug and you should let me know.
The new editor doesn’t need to refresh the page on every click like the old one did. You should find it works faster without so much scrolling of the page. For example, in the old editor, every time you clicked to move a picture the page had to be redrawn, causing it to scroll back up to the top, which then required you to scroll back down to see your book pages. Now it should stay put as you move pages around.
You can also drag and drop pages to rearrange them. Simply click on a page and drag it to where you want it to go. It takes a bit of getting used to how it decides where to put the page. Don’t worry, the buttons are still there and work just the way they did before, so you don’t have to drag and drop unless you want to.
Finally, you’ll see the “Save my book as a draft” button is always present, even when you’re editing a book you previously published. Now you can revert a book back to draft status if you wish.
As always, please let me know about problems you see.

Tar Heel Reader is approaching an important milestone … 1000 books! In celebration of the success our accessible library of books for beginning readers of all ages, we’d like to receive stories of the individuals who are using the site. We want to know what you think and hear about the students who are enjoying the books.

Simply add a comment to this post to share your stories about the readers who are using Tar Heel Reader.

Check out the quick screencast I made demonstrating how to use the Favorites features of Tar Heel Reader.

The Favorites page allows you to give your readers a choice among books that you have reviewed for appropriateness. Once you have the page setup with speech, color, and the books you want, just bookmark the page and you can come back to it later.

Let me know if you find this screencast useful.

I’ve modified the title slide on shows you download from the site. It now includes the author’s name and the picture is larger and has the right shape.

As usual, let me know if you see any problems.

The changes I rolled out today are intended to simplify the title pages of books. You’ll notice the controls have moved over to the left side and the picture is now centered.

To control speech you can click on the last 4 icons in the column at the left. I tried to depict the idea of silent, child, woman, man for the voice using a little family icon I found.

To control page color use the Setup button with the book icon. That page will also allow you to download the current book or to rewrite it as a new book. When you’re done with your setup click Return to Reading to return to the book you were on.

Please help me with bug reports. I don’t know about problems unless you tell me. Don’t assume that you did something wrong.

I just realized that there was a bug in the Save Draft function when you’re writing a book. I only found out because Paul sent an email telling me about it. I hate it that apparently several of you have had problems with it. It should be fixed now.

When you have a problem, let me know. If you’re having a problem it is almost certain that someone else is suffering too.

Tar Heel Reader has moved to its new home on the web at http://tarheelreader.org. Please make a note of the change and ask those you know who have posted links to update them. The old address will redirect users here.

This new version brings several changes that I hope you will see as improvements.

For readers:

1. Book pages are visually much simpler and should always fit on your computer screen.
2. Page controls and text stay in the same place from screen to screen.
3. Two-switch scanning is now more consistent.
4. Choices are presented for direct as well as switch access.
5. Readers can rate books from 1 to 3 stars.
6. All pictures are served from tarheelreader.org rather than Flickr. This should help those of you whose access was blocked by firewalls.

For teachers:

1. We now have library-like categories for books. In the coming week my students will be making a pass through the collection of assign books to categories (i.e. Animals, Health, etc.). You can optionally assign categories when you write or edit your books.
2. We have setup two categories Rated: E for everyone and Rated: C for caution. These may be helpful when choosing books.
3. We also have categories from the Beginning Literacy Framework. These are Type: Conventional, Type: Transitional, and Type: Other.
4. Finally, we have added a Reviewed flag that will be set by the professionals at the Center for Literacy and Disability Studies after books are reviewed for educational quality. A small badge icon will appear on these books.

Soon we’ll be moving to a new URL; http://tarheelreader.org/. It is online now, feel free to check it out and give us some feedback on the changes we’ve made. Don’t do anything there you want saved because it will all be overwritten when we transition.

I hope the cut over will happen in the next few days. Your login and all your books will be moved to the new site.

New features include:

• All images are served from the site rather than from Flickr. This should eliminate the problems with firewalls that some of you experienced.
• Switch access is more consistent with 2-switch scanning as used in other applications.
• Book and Favorites pages are more consistently formatted. For example the Next and Previous links should be in the same place on every page. Also space available for picture and text has been increased.
• We now have support for translating or re-writing books with the same pictures and new text.
• We now have traditional library categorization for books (Animals and Nature, Art and Music, etc.)
• Books in the Reviewed category have been checked for educational quality by a professional with the center.
• We also have categories from the Beginning Literacy Framework so that you can easily identify books that are Transitional, Conventional, or Other.
• Readers will be able to rate books as Great, Good, or OK by awarding 3, 2, or 1 stars.
• Books that are appropriate for all readers will be in the Rated: E for everyone category, those that are a bit more edgy will be in Rated: C for caution.

I’ve gotten several requests for speech in the PowerPoint downloads from Tar Heel Reader. I think I know how to do it but it will be a ton of work that will take time from other projects.

I’m wondering why folks feel they need PowerPoint? If I can figure out what we’re missing in the online version, perhaps I can enhance the site so that you don’ t need expensive commercial software.

I know some of you were having problems accessing the site from your schools. That should be fixed now.

Are their other features of PowerPoint that you need?

I have heard from many users who love Tar Heel Reader but are unable to use it because access to Flickr is blocked at your schools. No more! I have updated the site so that it should work even in places where Flickr is blocked.

Please let me know if you’re still having problems.

I’m thinking about enabling readers to give some simple feedback on the books they read. Maybe we could have 3 ratings with text and graphics such as smiley faces. I want this to be optional for readers and it should not complicate the book reading experience too much. I’ve also had requests for a The End page so I’m thinking of combining these things.

When you come to the end of a book, your choices would be:

1. Read this book again.
2. Go back to Favorites.
3. Rate this book.

The choice mechanism would like the Favorites page. What sort of graphics should each of these have?

If you select Rate this book you’re presented with a second page that has these choices:

1. OK.
2. Liked it.
3. Loved it.

Again, can you recommend some graphics for each of these?

After making a selection you’re taken back to The End page with only 2 choices:

1. Read this book again.
2. Go back to Favorites.

What do you think?