Digital reading — turn the page or click the screen
Education Week’s Spotlight Focus on Digital Reading highlighted half a dozen articles that educators need to factor into their decisions regarding reading material for students. As one-to-one technology continues to be integrated into education, reading isn’t just a print experience any more.
Publishers are now delivering curriculum on digital devices. Rather than having districts purchase textbooks, they’re purchasing digital licenses. Digital content formats can include e-books and audiobooks which assist struggling readers, but offer a fundamentally different reading experience.
Print reading tends to be a linear process with a turn-the-page-until-you’re-done type focus. Digital reading is often click on the page or hyperlink with a choose-your-own-adventure type feeling. Some describe this embedded links and scrolling process to be engaging while others claim it is distracting.
While opening a book and turning pages can be magical, clicking on a screen and seeing a brief movie clip to illustrate a point in the article has a different kind of magic. Screen reading allows students more opportunities to interact with text. They can highlight words, look up definitions, click on links, as well as play audio and video. Digital content offers them an opportunity to decide which additional embedded resources they will use. More resources offer easy access to information that boosts background knowledge which enhances comprehension.
Students have information at their fingertips. A quick internet search will likely yield most desired answers. Students don’t need to memorize and store as much information in their brains. Learning now often involves utilizing a search engine to locate a Youtube video of an expert or an article that might help.
Students have more books that are more accessible because they’ve been scanned and made available online. Informative TED talks can be watched on demand rather than waiting for a teacher to give a lecture. Are consumers of this immense body of digital knowledge too distracted to really benefit from it?
Elias Aboujaoude, a researcher at Stanford wrote, “If they lose the taste for words, develop an allergy to grammar, compress their attention spans, and become impatient with the time and space it takes to develop an idea, all the “big data” at their fingertips may prove of limited value, like a wasted resource for a generation that won’t know what to do with it.”
Beth Holland, a doctoral student, said she’s doing her project paperless. Her research books and articles are tagged, annotated and filed online. She accesses them from her phone or laptop and finds the titles with only a few clicks or taps. Any mistakes she made while annotating, can easily be fixed. She can quickly searches the text to find another reference and look up words instantly in a dictionary just by touching them.
Digital technology is transforming how students read, write, and remember. Brains are being rewired as key aspects of cognition are altered. Thus the reality of the classroom needs to adapt and change to adjust to it.
Teens with cellphones communicate mostly by texting which is harder to interpret because so much of meaning is conveyed by tone, gestures and facial expressions. While bitmojis and emoticons can be added to bridge this void, these pictograms of e-language do not express with the same nuance.
Literacy is being redefined with the infusion of technology. Students find information differently and now create texts that are interactive. Using new digital languages like coding, they add video and sound. Writing now is used to create a different kind of experience for the reader.
Trillions of words still comprise our modern online literacy base, but billions of photos uploaded each year add to the story. Words, facts, images and coding are being used to create this new digital reading experience.
Students are learning how to tell the technology what to do. Digital reading is altering how students access and comprehend what they read. They’ll likely continue to both turn the page and click the screen.