By UCL, University of Barcelona, University of Ioannina, Doukas School and DHBW
In the early days of the project we encountered a big challenge – how to find high quality freely available open digital reading materials that would allow our child readers to change the presentation of the text to suit their reading preferences e.g. text size, font, background colour. To address this challenge we formed partnerships with several talented authors and publishers who kindly agreed to contribute some of their stories and poetry to the iRead digital library. We now have a diverse range of non-fiction and fiction texts in English, Spanish, Greek and German, which will be read by thousands of school children across Europe during our upcoming pilot.
Below is an overview of our fantastic author and publisher partners:
English
- Wicked Young Writers Awards: an awards scheme that encourages young writers (aged 5-25) to use creative writing to look at life a little differently. Many of the young writer finalists have contributed their entries to the digital library.
- Pratham Books and Storyweaver: an Indian not-for profit publisher who created the Storyweaver platform as an open source digital books platform, with currently 8500+ stories in 113 languages. We have included a small selection of these stories from around the world within the digital library.
- Mark Lowery: a British author and
- primary teacher, who has contributed a short story called ‘The Zoo’ to the digital library.
- Text Project: a non-profit web platform that includes a library of levelled open
texts. Text project was founded by Elfrieda Hiebert who kindly agreed for large selection of the non-fiction texts to be included within the digital library. - Fiction Express and Alex Woolf: an innovation book platform which connect students with professional authors through co-creation of stories. One of their authors Alex Woolf has contributed one of the previously co-created books ‘Mystery at Marston’s Mill’ to the digital library.
Spanish
- Vicens Vives: a large publishing company based in Barcelona that publishes books in all fields, with education as a key area. It has contributed dozens of classic children’s stories to the iRead digital library.
- Biblioteca Virtual Miguel de Cervantes: they helped us find classic authors of children’s stories (e.g. Aesop’s fables, Parrault)
- Ramon Besora Oliva: a teacher, writer and editor, who is the author of many children’s books and stories. Ramon has contributed one of his most famous stories The bird that had no name and wanted to be a king.
- Sergio Andricaín: a writer, publisher, journalist and literary researcher. Sergio has contributed some of his poems addressed to a young audience.
- Text Project: A selection of these texts were translated into Spanish and adapted by journalist and writer Paula Solís and researcher Judit Serra.
Greek
- Patakis: a well-known Greek publisher with books in all fields, with its key areas of publishing activity being in education, books for children and young adults, literature, the humanities, dictionaries, as well as practical guides and diaries. Patakis has contributed over 40 literature books, suited for young primary school students, to the Greek digital library.
- Text Project: These texts were also suitable for the Greek students thus contributing to the Greek digital library.
- Greek Ministry of Education, Research and Religious Affairs: Curricula adjustments for the course of Greek language in Primary school (Vol. 1&2). There will be 50 texts from this curricula, accompanied by respective teaching plans and adequate supporting stuff for students with learning difficulties, within the Greek digital library.
German
- Dein Spiegel: is a children’s magazine with high quality texts for children concerning politics, geography and current news and ideas. This magazine has contributed the bulk of the texts that are to appear in the e-Reader.
- Geolino and Geolino Extra: are two children’s magazines that talk about history, geography and animals. They have contributed sample readings from both magazines to the project.
- Phontasia: is the first series of readers that build on a phonics order of difficulty for the German orthography. The stories are especially designed for beginning readers in order to allow for a positive reading experience from the start.
- Ursula Rickli: was a primary school teacher and now a textbook author who has developed various language teaching aids. Ursula has contributed a number of new texts that are written especially for the Phontasia method.
iread-project.eu 