Resources for Reading
SkillsTutor Program
Comprehension and Vocabulary
Books Online
There is no educational skill more fundamental than reading. While it is well understood that people learn in many modes besides reading, printed materials are still the heart and soul of education. From research to textbooks to on-line materials, the printed word is the primary vehicle of education. The sites listed here provide practice in comprehension, vocabulary, and analytical reading. There are also special sections devoted to reading and studying textbooks and to reading Websites critically. Finally we provide a link to our list of free e-texts and literature on-line.
SkillsTutor is a fully interactive software package that offers instruction in reading, writing, and math. If you are enrolled in Reading 50, your instructor may have given you specific assignments for this software. However, any COD student is welcome to use this software to brush up on grammar, punctuation, and writing skills. Click on the link below and follow the log-in instructions on the next page.
IMPORTANT:
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This software is paid for by COD and is only available to registered students of the college.
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At the end of each semester, including summer session, all students are deleted from this program.
SkillsTutor Log-In
Web Guide to SkillsTutor
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Essential Reading Skills—A companion website for a textbook by Kathleen T. McWhorter (Pearson Publishing). Use the pull down menu for “select chapter” for access to active reading and vocabulary summaries and quizzes.
The Reading Zone--From The English-Zone.com, by Kaye Mastin Mallory
This site offers reading exercises ranging from easy to advanced. Click on the “guest and members” icon for the free activities.Vocabulary items in each reading are linked to definitions, and every exercise has its own quiz.
Rocket Reader.com Free demos on this site allow you to check your reading comprehension speed and vocabulary. Scroll down to “Fun Test” and click on “Quick Free Reading Speed Test,” or click on “Quick Reading Skills Test.“
The Vocabulary Zone--From The English-Zone.com, by Kaye Mastin Mallory
This site offers a collection of vocabulary drills and quizzes for beginning, intermediate, and advanced students. Click on the “guest and members” icon for the free activities. There are also printable vocabulary lists, vocabulary games, and links to other Web sites than focus on vocabulary skills.
FreeRice.com A non-profit website run by the United Nations World Food Program that partners with the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University. Every time you play this interactive vocabulary game and get a correct answer, you help the United Nations meet its two goals: to provide education to everyone for free and to help end world with hunger by providing free rice to hungry people. You can start at any one of 60 levels.
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Okay, we went a bit over board here, listing many sites, but we could not believe the access to free “e-texts” we discovered during our search. From one or more of the sites, you’ll find entire texts of public domain books (fiction, poetry, non-fiction and reference books that are no longer under copyright) available for downloading or printing. Need the full text of Moby Dick, or Hamlet, or The Wizard of Oz? How about Crime and Punishment in the original Russian? You can find them on one or more of the sites listed below. The last two sites listed offer new works of literature composed specifically for electronic media.
Browse away and check out as many e-texts as you want! We only ask that you not print any text in any College of the Desert lab. Many of these books run to hundreds of pages, and printing them ties up both the server and the printer in our labs, to say nothing about the cost of paper and toner.
Alex Catalogue of Electronic Texts--Eric Lease Morgan, Infomotions, Inc.
Alex offers a free, extensive collection of public domain and open access documents with a focus on American and English literature, as well as western philosophy. You can search by author, title or subject/tag. You can download any item for use in a portable e-text reader, or download the entire Alex data base to your PC including the search engine for it. Warning: downloading the entire Alex database is not allowed in any COD computer lab. Please do not tie up our servers. If you want the database, load it at home.
Bartleby.com -
Great Books Online, Steven H. van Leeuwen.
Started as a personal research project, Bartleby classics of literature, nonfiction and reference for free. While it does not have the largest selection of books available, the site’s easy-to-use interface and search tools make it a pleasure to use.
Electronic Literature Directory--Project Director, Joseph Tabbi; Editors – Davin Heckman, et al; A resource for readers and writers, this directory provides an extensive database of literary works, authors, descriptions and keywords. It is also a critical companion to e-literature, hosting discussions that can be referenced and revised over time; however, once approved by the editors, the entries remain unchanged.
eServer.org--Geoffrey Sauer, Webmaster The EServer, founded in 1990 at Carnegie Mellon as The English Server, “ is an arts and humanities e-publishing co-op based at Iowa State University where hundreds of writers, editors and scholars gather to publish over 35,000 works free of charge.The site is dedicated to clear, accessible writing in the humanities" Although it includes historical documents, many of its resources are new documents often written directly for eServer. Authors are encouraged to submit original works and have the option of editing and maintaining them. This site typifies a whole new wave of publishing on-line. An interesting site to explore; full text topic searches available.
Famous Poets and Poems - A free poetry site. On our site you can find a large
collection of poems and quotes from over 631 poets
ManyBooks.net –maintained by Matthew McClintock. Most books come from Project Guttenberg, but the interface for this site is much cleaner and easier to use. Most author names are linked to Wikipedia, so you can quickly get biographical information on authors you do not know. You’ll find lots of unexpected items too, like State of the Union addresses of American Presidents (Under Author, go Carter, Jimmy, for instance). Or look under Works Project Administration and you’ll find a list of Slave Narratives that were gathered by ethnographers in the 1940s.
Project Gutenberg - Project Guttenbeg Literary Archive Foundation One of the original efforts to collect literature online, Project Guttenberg offers access to over 100,000 books and documents, and 28,000 free E-text books. While most of the texts are in English, you will also find a considerable number of material from other cultures and languages.
The Internet Public Library (IPL)--Arts and Humanities, Literature, Online Texts, hosted at the iSchool at Drexel University, this site lists 28 resources from which you can access books, as well as a link to Classical Chinese texts and original contemporary fiction. The “Search Help” link offers advice for searches, including how to use Wildcard Characters, Boolean Operators, Range Searches and Advanced Features.
The On-Line Books Page--John Mark Ockerbloom, University of Pennsylvania
This site offers an index, as well as archives for over 12,000 free volumes of poetry, fiction, history, religion, science, and politics. Because most of these texts are located all over the Internet, there is no predicting how a particular text will be formatted. Search is by author or title but not by subject. However, you can browse through an extensive Subject Catalogue that is organized according to the Library of Congress call numbers. Click on a subject in the catalogue and you are presented with a long list of links to books in that subject.
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