It is difficult to get students to read the ebook. Here’s a suggestion. Make engaging activities part of the ebook so students have to open it to see them.
These activities can be placed in ebooks where they are directly related to the content. Here’s one example.
Incorporate Surprises into Your eBook
This little tool is not related to Cengage, but you might like to give it a try. ThingLink is a tool that allows you to place tags into images or other media. This tool allows you easily to insert tags into images and video. Video can also contain pauses that allow you to insert additional content. These tags and pauses may lead to additional images, videos, or even surveys. Students can click on tags to see a variety of interesting media.
You can get students to take part in a poll or survey while they watch a video.
An example for your eBook
In this example, we will use the idea of aggression being perceived differently by men and women. Men tend to focus on the more aggressive actions, such as hitting someone (called “overt aggression”), while women are more sensitive to less aggressive actions, such as two people arguing (“relational aggressive”). Professors Meredith Kneavel and Joshua Fetterman use a video clip of an altercation between Bugs Bunny and Porky Pig to illustrate this point in an engaging, effective way.
ThingLink was used to recreate their class activity. Students are shown the short cartoon and then asked questions.
Online and in-class versions:
Here’s an activity that you can use in class. It contains poll questions using PollEverwhere. You can see small bullets at the end of the video timeline when it will pause. These bullets can be accelerated.
Here’s another version you can use to create an online class (the same questions but created with Google Forms).
Everyone loves surprises! Use this to your advantage to get students reading their ebooks. Students will talk about your “Easter eggs” with their friends if you are successful.
This video will show you how to embed Thinglink videos, such as this Thinglink video, into the ebook flow of your students. The video below shows me where I want the video appear for students. Copy the link below to your clipboard by right clicking and copying it: Bugs Bunny or Aggression Follow the video’s instructions. (note: no audio)
– Michael Britt