Free Audio Books for Educators: Lit 2 Go

A colleague of mine just sent me a link to a great literature resource from Florida’s Educational Technology Clearninghouse–Lit2G0: MP3 Stories and Poems. The Clearinghouse is providing free downloads of classic public domain texts.

There are other sites that offer free mp3s of public domain books (such as Librivox and Ejunto), but what sets Lit2Go apart are the educational materials that go with each title.

Take, Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey for instance. The main page offers a brief summary of the book and links to each chapter. Clicking on a chapter link takes you to a new page where you have the opportunity to download the chapter’s mp3, read the text online, or download the chapter as a pdf file. In addition, each chapter page gives the reading level, genre, country of origin, themes and reading strategies. It also includes support material, which is usually an open-ended question that could be used to start a discussion or lead to a writing assignment.

All of the recordings I sampled seemed professionally done, if sometimes a bit stiff, and many of the titles are available through iTunes. Authors include the usual suspects: Jane Austen, Charlotte and Emily Brontë, Lewis Carroll, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Brothers Grimm, Rudyard Kipling, Edgar Allen Poe, and Robert Louis Stevenson.

There were a few surprises, however–authors and titles I didn’t expect to see: James Baldwin’s The Story of Siegfried, James Weldon Johnson’s Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, George MacDonald’s The Light Princess, and Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto.

All in all, Lit 2 Go is a superb literature resource for teachers and students. I’ll be visiting it often and telling my students about it in class this week.