Classic Lit Accessible through Schoology

Guest post written by Kathleen Hempel, BMS-Station Librarian

Many classic books are now in the Public Domain (copyright ends 70 years after creator’s death), allowing for us to release them to students as PDFs and in other formats. These books are available as ePubs through The Gutenberg Project and can be uploaded to Schoology and assigned to classes.

Audio of many of the classics have been recorded through Librivox, a great source for free public domain audiobooks. These, too, can be put in a folder in Schoology to provide students audio support for difficult and complex classic works.

In the middle school where we use the Notability app, we can merge the audio with the PDF. First, we download the PDF of the book from Gutenberg and export it to Notability. Then we download the MP3 audio files from Schoology and export them to Notability. When we open Notability, we attach the MP3 to an existing Note.

This allows for the microphone and play bar to appear while reading the book, and students to annotate the PDF in Notability. Here’s a video that walks you through the steps to merge the classics.

See your building librarian for assistance in finding resources to supplement your units.