This post contains content that was referenced and used in the presentation, Build Your Own E-Books with CAST’s UDL Book Builder, at the Ohio Education Technology Conference on February 15, 2012.
In this presentation, participants learned to create electronic books in the CAST Book Builder tool using the text, images, and audio found below. Step-by-step directions are available. A sample book is also available to read.
Text
This text from the Beyond Penguins and Polar Bears online magazine is free and licensed under a licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.
The Arctic and Antarctica: Are They the Same, or Different?
by Jessica Fries-Gaither
Have you heard of the Arctic and Antarctica? What do you know about them? Even though they are about the same size, cold, and covered with ice, these two places are very different.
Where are these two places? The Arctic is at the top of the world. It is a large ocean surrounded by land. Sea ice forms over the Arctic Ocean when the temperature is cold enough. There is more sea ice in the winter, and less in the summer.
At the bottom of the world is Antarctica. It is a large continent surrounded by the Southern Ocean. Most of the land is covered by very thick ice. During the winter, water from the Southern Ocean also freezes and forms sea ice.
Both places are cold all year. But Antarctica is much colder than the Arctic. In the winter, the average temperature at the North Pole is 40 degrees below zero. At the South Pole, it is 76 degrees below zero! Summer is warmer, but it isn’t really warm. The average temperature then is 32 degrees at the North Pole. At the South Pole, a summer day might be 18 degrees below zero!
Flat land in the Arctic is called tundra. The tundra is covered with many small plants like shrubs, berries, grasses, and mosses. Antarctica has only a few types of plants like grasses and mosses. Both places are too cold for trees to grow.
Whales, porpoises, and seals live in the Arctic and Southern Oceans. Musk ox, reindeer, caribou, wolves, and foxes live on the Arctic tundra. Polar bears also live in the Arctic. They hunt on the sea ice that covers the Arctic Ocean. There aren’t as many land animals in Antarctica. Penguins and other birds live there. The only other living things are very small insects, worms, and tiny animals that live in the soil.
The Arctic includes parts of eight countries. People have lived there for thousands of years. Today, about four million people live in the Arctic! No one actually lives in Antarctica. It does not belong to any country and does not have a government. Scientists work there, but they leave when their work is finished.
Did you know that these two places were so different? How are these places like the place where you live? How is your home different from these places?
This version of the text is written for students in grades 3-5. It has a Flesch-Kincaid Reading Level of 4.7. For a level appropriate for students in grades 1-2, please view this pdf document.
Images
Images to accompany this text can be found in the Beyond Penguins and Polar Bears Photo Gallery.
Additional images can be found by using the Creative Commons and USA.gov search engines.
Creative Commons is a meta-search – you can search Flickr, Fotopedia, Google, YouTube, etc.
Search.USA.gov is the U.S. government’s official search engine. It is a comprehensive, searchable index of about 50 million pages from federal, state, local, territorial, and tribal websites. You can limit your searches to images: http://search.usa.gov/images
Audio
Recorded audio narration for the text can be found here. Click on the link and look at the right side of the page in the Navigator box. Click on the folder that says “Audio Files.” Click on it again. The 20 audio files should be listed. To download a file, move your cursor over the file and then click on More (to the right of the file name), Download, and then Save. You can then save the file to your desktop or anywhere you can easily find it later!
This article was written by Jessica Fries-Gaither and Kimberly Lightle. Email Kimberly Lightle, Principal Investigator, with any questions about the content of this site.
Copyright February 2012 – The Ohio State University. This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 0733024. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. This work is licensed under an Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported Creative Commons license.
