Effective Literacy Website Review: Epic!

Epic! is a digital library founded in January 2013 by Suren Markosien and Kevin Donahue. It made its breakthrough when its founders realized how much children who loved their tablets were easily reaching out for their devices to play games or watch videos when they could be spending much of that time reading. With the support of top investors and veterans from the children’s publishing industry, the talented team built the digital library to provide children specially in K-5 with a reading experience that would live up to its Epic! name.

Upon landing on the website on https://www.getepic.com, you will find that it offers a free 30 day trial to access 25,000 books, learning videos, quizzes, and more for a monthly payment of $7.99 per month. For educators and librarians however, the website is kept exclusively and completely free thanks to family subscriptions. With a verified educator/librarian account, the website will guide you to an interactive and brief tour where you can earn yourself an Epic! certified teacher award just for completing it. It is fairly easy and helps familiarize users with its navigation for a smoother exploration.

While teachers can personalize account settings to easily find relative books and topics for class lessons, they can also create individual student accounts to provide them with the same effect. When students access their individual accounts, the website will take note of their age, favorite subjects, and interests to start them off with recommended reads. The website’s recommendations will also adjust based on students’ reading selections. These are neat features to support students with pleasure reading, which plays a key factor in their exposure to any kind of reading and their overall literacy experience. If recommended reads do not draw in its user, a search engine is provided so that students can search for a book by its author, title, or keyword.

As previously mentioned, Epic! offers videos and quizzes. Videos range from how-to projects to informational learning videos that nicely complement the website’s library of books. Quizzes are sorted by topic so that students can choose what to test their knowledge on. They will immediately be provided with feedback as the quiz progresses. Additionally, teachers have the option to create a quiz to reflect understanding of a specific text.

As for the actual reading experience, it is let alone given outstandingly. For one thing, the website delivers on graphics. The books are displayed with their front covers exposed, illustrations are included within, and their pages even flip to represent that real-book feeling. There are also a number of audiobooks for a “read to me option,” in which text can be further magnified or underlined as they are read aloud. Each word of every book is clickable so that students can instantly view definitions of unfamiliar words. Book topics range from history, adventure, daily life, fantasy, mystery and more.

To further support student engagement, rewards that come in the form of achievement badges can be unlocked all around. To earn them, students would just need to explore the website and of course, build up their reading time. They are also free to favorite books and create different collections.

Everything about Epic! is beautiful and offers a lot of beneficial features to support reading with high hopes of engagement and learning. The website is made easy to navigate for students and is simply fun to explore. Although home access is not available for free, the overall literacy experience that teachers can provide under an educator account is worthwhile and may even carry on to the home environment.