Integrating technology with children's literacy

BigUniverse.com is an award-winning web community devoted to reading, creating and sharing children's picture books online.The literacy website for K-8 students instills a love for reading, writing, and learning. What can you do at BigUniverse.com? You can...

• Read and reference beautiful fiction and nonfiction picture books online from today's best publishers.
• Find hundreds of books using the browse and search features. Find books by grade, reading level, interest age, category, and/or language.
• Take online quizzes, get instant scores and view assessment reports by classroom or students.
• Automatically maintain a reading log.

Anil Hemrajani is responsible for the overall vision, strategy, and operation of Big Universe.com. Anil has always been fascinated with children's book illustrations and cartoons. In addition, having traveled the world, he strongly believes that we live on a very small planet in a big universe, and that while people look and act differently, we all have the same basic needs and are all indeed world citizens of our planet. It is this combination of professional skills, the love of children's books, global experiences and personal beliefs that led him to launch BigUniverse.com!

I had the opportunity to ask Anil about the creation of BigUniverse.com and its features...

How and when was BigUniverse.com founded?
Big Universe was founded in 2006 by myself (Anil Hemrajani). The idea was born out of the desire to improve our world via the next generation -- our children -- by educating them.

What is the goal of BigUniverse.com?
Delivery anytime, anywhere engaging education. The engaging part if important since there are too many distractions that take up children's time these days (e.g. TV, video games).

Members and non-members can preview fiction and non-fiction picture books online. Does BigUniverse maintain contracts with these publishers and are you continually trying to grow your publishers' list?
Yes, Big Universe maintains contracts with publishers and we definitely are trying to grow our publisher's list.

How many titles does Big Universe offer and do you update those books regularly?
We currently have about 500 titles from various publishers and another 500+ titles written by our members. We add new books as often as we sign up new publishers and/or receive new titles from our existing publishers.

How do members create their own books and how much computer skill is necessary?
Members create books directly on our website using our Big Universe Author tool. Very little computer skills are required since we see kids as young as 5 years old all the way to grandparents creating books on our site. Also, we have had almost 10,000 (ten thousand) books created on our site in the past 1.5 years, so it goes to show that creating books is relatively easy.

In addition to offering books online, how does BigUniverse.com engage its readers and promote children's literacy?
We have a "SHARE" section on our site that provides safe and kid-friendly social networking features. Some of the features include the ability to create and share virtual bookshelves, recommendation lists, published books, and more. We find that this engages kids and adults alike. Apart from this, we regularly send out newsletters to thousands of subscribers and also have thousands of fans and followers on Facebook and Twitter.

What else can we expect from BigUniverse.com?
In the near future, we'll be launching the ability for people to order hard copies of their created books. We'll likely begin with soft cover bound versions and later introduce hard cover books. Apart from that, we will continue to add new titles in English and other languages and keep enhancing our software with new features on a regular basis.

Please visit BigUniverse.com to learn more.

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Lori Calabrese is an award-winning children's author. To learn more about Lori and her books, please visit www.loricalabrese.com

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