Speaker 1: Twenty five thousand free books for teachers and students. I'm
Speaker 1: Rich Dmiro. This is rich on Tech Daily. Recently, I've
Speaker 1: been testing out a new app called Epic. This is
Speaker 1: sort of like Netflix or Spotify, but for books more
Speaker 1: than twenty five thousand of them, to be exact. And
Speaker 1: here's the interesting part. You can subscribe for eight dollars
Speaker 1: a month at home, but if you're a teacher with
Speaker 1: a classroom and students, you can get access to all
Speaker 1: of these books for free, the same exact experience, but
Speaker 1: free when you're in the classroom. So we visited a
Speaker 1: classroom at Aolian elementary school in Whittier, California, where Epic
Speaker 1: is being used, and it works just like it does
Speaker 1: at home, except all the kids get to access this
Speaker 1: for free. So Epic is an app. It's in the
Speaker 1: app Store. You can download it to a variety of devices.
Speaker 1: We saw it running on iPads and chromebooks. My son
Speaker 1: has also been using it at home on an iPad
Speaker 1: with a test account. And basically, it's a bunch of
Speaker 1: books kind of organized in very so you can organize
Speaker 1: by topic, you can organize by reading level, you can
Speaker 1: organize by age, whatever you want, and there's tons of
Speaker 1: stuff to find in here, twenty five thousand books for
Speaker 1: major publishers, including HarperCollins, McMillan, National Geographic Kids. A lot
Speaker 1: of the big series are in there, but you do
Speaker 1: have to pick and choose and find stuff. Not every
Speaker 1: book imaginable is in here, but there's definitely enough to
Speaker 1: make up for the fee of eight dollars a month
Speaker 1: if you're paying at home, and it's certainly good enough
Speaker 1: for free at school. And one of the features that
Speaker 1: I really like are the quizzes. My son also really
Speaker 1: likes these, So after you're done reading a book, there
Speaker 1: are quizzes at the end, and these can test your
Speaker 1: kids reading proficiency. Another feature parents and teachers will like
Speaker 1: and kids is the read to you feature. So this
Speaker 1: is where kind of like an audiobook, but the books
Speaker 1: read to you, but they highlight some of the words
Speaker 1: as they go along, so kids can become more confident readers.
Speaker 1: Another feature parents will like. You can get weekly report cards,
Speaker 1: so you can see in an email what your kids
Speaker 1: are reading. The email will include the books that they've
Speaker 1: looked through, how many pages they've turned, how long they
Speaker 1: spent reading all that good stuff, and the co founder
Speaker 1: Kevin Donahue of Epic and a Skype interview, told me
Speaker 1: that this is all about seeing how the child is
Speaker 1: improving with their reading and showing the parent some of
Speaker 1: the interests their kids has around reading. I thought it
Speaker 1: was really interesting some of the books that my kid
Speaker 1: was reading it was based on stuff he was learning
Speaker 1: in the classroom. He went home and then looked up
Speaker 1: books on those same topics. I thought that was really interesting. So, again,
Speaker 1: Epic is completely free for kids while they're in the classroom,
Speaker 1: and the way they do this is the teachers basically
Speaker 1: log in and then they share some sort of code
Speaker 1: with the kids that only works while they're in the class.
Speaker 1: But if you want to do this at home, you
Speaker 1: can get a subscription for about eight dollars a month.
Speaker 1: Seems like a pretty good deal considering Netflix a little
Speaker 1: bit more than that. But I also found a bunch
Speaker 1: of deals, like a special teacher offer at six dollars
Speaker 1: a month, And I think, you know, six bucks a
Speaker 1: month for all these books is not bad, especially if
Speaker 1: you've purchased books for your kids. They can get pretty
Speaker 1: expensive at the bookstore. So when it comes to privacy,
Speaker 1: since this is geared for kids twelve and under. I
Speaker 1: had to ask about the privacy aspects. There are no
Speaker 1: ads on Epic and there is no social networking aspect.
Speaker 1: Kevin Donahue again, the co founder, told me they don't
Speaker 1: enable kids to connect or chat or message each other.
Speaker 1: It's really just a content consumption platform. And so when
Speaker 1: I talked to the teacher at aol in elementary, I
Speaker 1: asked what is the downside to Epic, and the teacher,
Speaker 1: Han Buie told me she said, if there is one downside,
Speaker 1: it's that the kids just want to keep reading. And
Speaker 1: I think that sounds like a pretty good problem for
Speaker 1: teachers and parents. All right, If you want to get
Speaker 1: a link to Epic and check it out, you can
Speaker 1: go to my website. Just go to Rich on tech
Speaker 1: dot tv. Again, the app is called Epic. It's got
Speaker 1: a big exclamation point at the end. You can search
Speaker 1: for it in the app store, check it out for yourself,
Speaker 1: or tell your kids teacher about it so they can
Speaker 1: get access for free at school. Thanks so much for listening.
Speaker 1: The best thing you can do for me is to
Speaker 1: rate and review the in the Apple Podcasts app. I
Speaker 1: really do appreciate that that way Apple shows it to
Speaker 1: more people. I'm Rich Damiro. Thanks for listening. I'll talk
Speaker 1: to you soon.