Kids, regardless of where they live or what social or cultural background they come from, have a natural ability to pick up a device, fiddle around with the drop-down menus, and figure out how to make the technology work for them. It was no different when students in Ghana and Clearwater, Fla. were handed an … Continue Reading →

About 18 months ago, before Worldreader even had office space, the team unpacked 20 Kindle 2s, and a handful of children’s books were uploaded onto the e-readers. With ambitious plans sketched out on paper and a lot hope in their suitcases, Worldreader’s Colin McElwee, David Risher, and Mike Sundermeyer flew from Barcelona to Ghana and started … Continue Reading →

About a year ago, 500 children and teachers in Kade and Adeiso, Ghana came to school and found e-readers filled with a total of 25,000 e-books. In the United States, a similar thing happened at Clearwater, Fla. High School—2,100 e-readers loaded with math and language arts books were being rolled out as new classroom learning … Continue Reading →

Ah, the long break between school terms. Is there any better time to kick back and catch up on those books you’ve long been meaning to power through? Knowing what a simple pleasure that is and seeing how quickly our kids in Ghana have latched onto reading, Worldreader recently launched iRead Vacation School. iRead Vacation … Continue Reading →

  Author Keith Thomson fell into writing novels in a roundabout way. Before he penned his bestselling thrillers Once a Spy and Twice A Spy, Keith was a semi-pro baseball player in France, an editorial cartoonist for Newsday, a filmmaker who won the Laura Napor Award at the Sundance Film Festival, and a screenwriter. He … Continue Reading →

Bestselling author Holly Black remembers exactly how she became a voracious reader. Although her parents often read to her books like Thomasina and Heidi, sheer annoyance motivated her to learn to read on her own before she started kindergarten. It bugged her that her parents could do something she couldn’t. “When I was very young, … Continue Reading →

Motivated teachers. Check. A dedicated community. Check. Committed coaches. Check. Healthy doses of curiosity, willingness, and imagination. Triple check. Add to this about 15 hours of hands-on instruction and a week’s worth of training assessments, and here’s what you get: 14 teachers in the Kenyan countryside amped up about e-readers and the possibility of improving … Continue Reading →

Sara Rhyne stands at the doorway of the Ntimigom School in Kenya. From the top of the hill, she glances out at the wide-open spaces, and watches life – and cows – pass by. Inside the low-lit classroom, under a dusty chalkboard, a group of 14 teachers involved in The Kilgoris Project fire up their … Continue Reading →

  In Ghana, books were hard to come by when children’s author Meshack Asare was young. The nearest library was 24 miles away, and a mobile book unit visited his town every six months or so. While he managed to get his hands on the few school textbooks, Royal primers, Oxford English readers, and the … Continue Reading →

  As a child, author and illustrator Sanna Stanley spent eight years in what is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Although she says growing up in the bush, where she lived from age six to 14, was the “norm” for her, in retrospect she sees how the experience shaped her life and work. … Continue Reading →