My Driving Question is What is the influence of e-readers on struggling readers? For all of my study I focused on students using the e-readers during a time I call "read to self". Read to self time is a daily reading time in which, before e-readers, each student sat with their book bag, with six books that the student has chosen, anywhere in the classroom and read for 20 minutes. This was not 22 kids doing this at the same time. It was part of a rotation in the classroom where other students were either writing, doing word work, practicing language skills on Lexia on the ipads, or in small group instruction with the teacher. The desired outcome was that the e-readers would motivate the struggling and reluctant readers in my 2nd grade classroom to "read" an entire book or at the very least spend the read to self time with some language and vocabulary swirling around their head. I piloted four different e-readers and the most useful were Storia and Tumblebooks. Students can read the books on their own or the program will read the story to the student with highlighted text.
Phase II of my study is to bring the e-readers into small group instruction. I have been using Storia for this purpose. Storia is part of Scholastic and therefore contains scholastic books. My students love this because we do Scholastic book orders and many of the books on Storia are also found in the order forms. This is good, it gets their attention. It motivates.
The e-readers are great and they have all kinds of bells and whistles, but they come with their own set of issues. Directional Tracking, tracking words with a finger, is a key component of the reading process. Tracking with a finger on an ipad screen causes all kinds of problems. With Storia a dictionary definition can pop up if you touch the screen, or the page disappears because they touched a tab at the top, just a myriad of screen issues. So, I'm trying to train the kids to track in the air, hover their finger above the words. It's crazy. As if teaching reading isn't hard enough already now I'm trying to figure out to have my students do finger acrobatics. If the words are too small they can tap the screen or use two fingers to enlarge or reduce, but students can miss out on a whole page while they're trying to figure this out. I'm going to keep using the e-readers in small group but a real book might continue to be the more appropriate "device".
Phase II of my study is to bring the e-readers into small group instruction. I have been using Storia for this purpose. Storia is part of Scholastic and therefore contains scholastic books. My students love this because we do Scholastic book orders and many of the books on Storia are also found in the order forms. This is good, it gets their attention. It motivates.
The e-readers are great and they have all kinds of bells and whistles, but they come with their own set of issues. Directional Tracking, tracking words with a finger, is a key component of the reading process. Tracking with a finger on an ipad screen causes all kinds of problems. With Storia a dictionary definition can pop up if you touch the screen, or the page disappears because they touched a tab at the top, just a myriad of screen issues. So, I'm trying to train the kids to track in the air, hover their finger above the words. It's crazy. As if teaching reading isn't hard enough already now I'm trying to figure out to have my students do finger acrobatics. If the words are too small they can tap the screen or use two fingers to enlarge or reduce, but students can miss out on a whole page while they're trying to figure this out. I'm going to keep using the e-readers in small group but a real book might continue to be the more appropriate "device".