At the public library where I work, many newcomers to the United States show up to use the computer center. The town I work in has residents from 92 different nations.
I've come to learn that many of these people are eager to learn English – and they need to learn English during the time of the day that they're free – which is not necessarily the same time as when English classes are offered around town.
To help them on their learning journey I've been taking donated computers to some of their home. A computer on its own will not help them learn English, though, so I decided to create some freely distributable multimedia that I can copy onto these donated computers. These learning materials I've been making, with the help of others in the community, may or may not be a helpful learning resource. I need to give it a try, though. If it does meet some of their learning needs, that would make the effort more than worthwhile.
This same learning material can be used by native English speakers – and may be freely distributed via the Internet, USB flash drives, CD-ROM's, etc. I'm hoping that some of the other people on the CompuMentor Computer Refurbishers email list will install these learning materials on donated computers being distributed in other cities and countries.
One of the first projects I worked on was the Helen Keller Autobiography project, which is well on its way to being completed.
Another project I worked on was the QuickTime Children's Stories and Reading Passages project, in which I created QuickTime files with a robot voice reading aloud some of my children's stories and nonfiction reading passages. I created these on a Macintosh computer using a shareware program called Tex-Edit, one of the robotic voices from Cepstral and Snapz Pro, a screencasting program for Macs.
In creating these QuickTime files I was careful to choose a codec (a method of compressing the video) that would work on older computers. I chose the QuickTime codec called "Animation," which should work well on computers as far back as 1997. If I chose a more recent codec, such as H.264, then these video files would not be viewable on older computers – defeating the point of creating the files.
As part of the experiment in creating these QuickTime files, I include my email address at the end of each file and invite anyone who wishes to make a small donation via PayPal. In the future it will be much more common for authors to have direct contact with readers in this way. Guess what? The future is now.
To view a sample QuickTime file, see The Story of a Young Artist. The entire collection of QuickTime files has been zipped (compressed into an archive) and uploaded to the Internet Archive. The archive is available here. The size of this download is about 140 megabytes. Do please pass it on to someone who might benefit from it.
It's useful to note that most of the children's stories I've written are aimed at 3rd and 4th graders. They might be enjoyed by younger or older students, though.