Technology can be a lot of fun.
Course there are blessings and curses to most of it and families have to work diligently to keep it all in check. As a homeschool family way out in the country, technology has been for the most part a blessing. We do not have access to a comprehensive public library not to mention very limited local shopping, so technology has certainly helped us to feel not so isolated.
Back when when my daughter got her Kindle it was more or less an experiment. Hoping that it would encourage her to read more with the options of limitless on-line books, many free also. She used it, but not as enthusiastically as her mother had idealistically hoped. I began searching out audio book options on Amazon but soon became frustrated at the cost. Audio books are ridiculously expensive unless you buy a membership to sites like Audible. A viable options for those anticipating listening to many.
Then one day, my nine year old discovered a really cool option...yes, it took a child to figure this out....that the Kindle Touch has a text-to-speech option in the menu. Wow, at first I was skeptical that it was merely a feature for some books, but it's not! I felt like we were cheating and we'd somehow beaten "the system", ha!!
So, we now have audio books without having to pay the premium price, woo hoo! Now the narrator is a little dry and robotic, but you can change the voice from male to female and adjust the speed. So cool!
This also means pre-reading children and new readers can enjoy the sounds of the books. Many of the free books are actually pictorial so they can look at them while listening. A really cool feature and sadly it took us this long to discover it.
Anyway, we may be behind the times with this nugget of enlightenment but wanted to share in case you too were in a little technological darkness.
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