Students in Texas can get unlimited access to thousands of digital books to read over the summer

Tricia Nora, right, a pediatric nurse practitioner who works at Mary's Place, a family homeless shelter located inside an Amazon corporate building, reads a book to Emilyanne Wade, 12, who lives at the shelter, Wednesday, June 17, 2020, in Seattle. The facility is home to the Popsicle Place shelter program, an initiative to address the needs of homeless children with life-threatening health conditions. (AP Photo/Ted S. Warren) (Ted S. Warren, Copyright 2020 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.)

As parents, as well as educators, grow concerned over whether their students will be prepared for the upcoming school year, the Texas Education Agency (TEA) and Renaissance have created an initiative to help combat the “COVID slide.”

TEA in partnership with Renaissance, an online education resource, is offering unlimited access to digital books and age-appropriate news articles for students entering grades K - 12.

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Through this partnership, students have access to digital books in English and Spanish on the myON by Renaissance platform.

“We couldn’t be more excited to work with educators across the great state of Texas,” said Chris Bauleke, CEO of Renaissance. “We’re thrilled that so many families and their children will get to experience myON for the first time this summer—helping parents keep their children engaged, learning, and prepared for fall.”

To read on myON, students can log in to the shared account with the username read and password myon.

In addition to digital books, students are able to read news articles that are reviewed by a child psychologist for age-appropriate content.

To help readers, myON also provides optional reading supports like naturally-recorded audio, text-highlighting, and an embedded dictionary.

Through this no-cost version of myON, available exclusively through TEA, every child in Texas is granted access to:

  • 1000s of enhanced digital books with optional reading supports including naturally-recorded audio, text highlighting, embedded dictionary (English and Spanish titles)
  • Daily news articles with multi-media resources, written just for students and reviewed by a child psychologist for age-appropriate content (English, French, and Spanish)
  • Download up to 20 books at a time for offline reading
  • Aggregated engagement metrics, including total number of books and articles students have read and the amount of time they have spent reading, as well as indicators of reading habits including when students are reading with myON

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