What is Bookshare?
According to their website, “Bookshare makes reading easier. People with dyslexia, blindness, cerebral palsy, and other reading barriers can customize their experience to suit their learning style and find virtually any book they need for school, work, or the joy of reading.”
- Customize Reading: choose ebooks in audio, audio with highlighted text, braille, large font and more.
- Wide Selection: Over one million titles to choose from and more are being added all the time.
- Read Anywhere: Read on your choice of devices, including smartphones, tablets, Chromebooks, computers and more.
- Who Qualifies? Refer to the Bookshare website to see if your student qualifies for this service.
Adding a Student Account
An ACTT referral is not needed to develop a Bookshare account. At all school levels, there should be a Bookshare sponsor for each school. In most cases, they are special education caseload managers and/or 504 liaisons. Contact your ACT Team leader for assistance with becoming a sponsor at your school and for help adding student accounts. The sponsor is the "individual" who qualifies a student and assigns accounts to a student.
How to get Individual Memberships for Students: There are two kinds of memberships that can be set up for students. An organizational membership which allows only the teacher to add books to a student's account. An individual membership allows students to add books to their account as well as access their books from various platforms such as Read2go.
Accessing Books
- Bookshare web reader (free) is accessible with both an FCPS organizational account and an individual account. This makes reading on a Chromebook, desktop and access at home easy and is the preferred method of access for beginners new to Bookshare.
- Assessing Books using the Bookshare Web Reader through Reading Lists
- How to use Bookshare's Reading List
- Bookshare Reading Apps by Device Type
Resources:
- What is Bookshare?
- Who is eligible and how does a student qualify?
- Creating a Bookshare Reading List for Your Entire Class to Share
- Bookshare Learning Center
- Bookshare Training Resources Library
- Contact Bookshare during Pacific Time Zone hours at 1-650-352-0198 for support.