Scholastic Digitizes Award-Winning "True Books" Titles for New Web-Based eBook and Video Program "TrueFlix"

NEW YORK, NY — January 5, 2011 — A classic non-fiction book series, True Books, is coming to life this year in TrueFlix, a new online learning resource from Scholastic (NASDAQ: SCHL), the global children's publishing, education and media company. With digitally enhanced e-books supported by a deep reservoir of videos, articles, images, and related media, TrueFlix provides students in Grades 3 to 5 with engaging content and lessons in several core content areas in science and social studies. With the new Common Core Standards’ call for enhanced emphasis on non-fiction, TrueFlix gives educators a powerful new tool to help build students' content knowledge.

To create TrueFlix, Scholastic digitized titles from Children's Press' award-winning series True Books – a staple in libraries and classrooms for decades. Forty-seven titles were digitized for the launch of TrueFlix, with topics ranging from "Climate Change" to "Black Holes" to "The Declaration of Independence." Other titles will follow as the program grows.

With TrueFlix, students will be able to:

  • Watch the Video: A streaming video that introduces each topic.
  • Read the Book: A flipbook version of the True Book with page-turning and read-along features, chapter tabs, and vocabulary terms identified and defined.
  • Explore More: Related content that provides opportunities to link directly to primary source documents, and related articles from Grolier Online for further research and to related fiction for additional reading. 

"With TrueFlix, we've taken the technology available to us today to make the fantastic True Books content that teachers and librarians have embraced for more than 60 years even more engaging and rich for today's students," said Hugh Roome, President of Scholastic Library Publishing. "The combination of True Books content with video, and links to primary source material all delivered in a whiteboard ready format, will help teachers help their students build knowledge and dive deeper to pursue their individual interests."

When a school or library purchases TrueFlix, parents, teachers and students in the school and across the community are able to access it with a username and password anywhere there is a web connection. Teachers can present the content on a whiteboard, and students can use it for homework from their homes or for research in the library. Each TrueFlix topic comes with a lesson plan for educators, including essential questions to help provoke classroom discussion and cultivate 21st Century skills; an assessment tool to help teachers monitor student progress; and project ideas for beginning researchers. In addition, there is a speech-to-text audio feature that is particularly useful in helping struggling readers master complex content areas, as well as carefully-curated web links so students can further explore online. Although TrueFlix takes advantage of technology to offer rich content in a new way, students can still enjoy all of the True Books in print as well.

For more information about Scholastic, visit our Media Room at http://mediaroom.scholastic.com.

Contact:

Tyler Reed
212.343.6427
treed@scholastic.com