Assistant Principal Report
By Sue Coffey
Reading and Digital Technologies
Learning from Home has heightened everyone awareness of how we use technology for learning. Teachers generally see computers and IPads as tools that support learning. We are able to communicate with children and parents through video, the written word or virtually and as you know our Learning from Home website is a wonderful example of this.
But how does technology impact on students reading? I have conducted some research to find out if there are any impacts on young learners and what we might be able to do to help. Digital devices are here to stay so it’s worth considering how we use them to read and which strategies can help improve children’s reading fluency and comprehension.
Deep Reading
According to Devin, “in the digital space, that means disrupting a pattern of skipping around, writing short chats and getting lost down the rabbit hole of the internet. It means teaching kids ways to break down a complex text, find key ideas, organize them and defend them.”
Integrating technology
Devin believes that technology should never be taught separately. Instead, he focuses on developing core reading strategies and highlights how “practicing them in the digital space can make feedback easier and help students go further in their thinking.
Focus on the following strategies to improve reading comprehension when using technology.
- Slow students down so they are focusing on the text – really important when reading on a digital device as it is natural to skim and look for relevant information. Some research says that we read in a letter F formation. Reading across the top, scan down and read a little more across and then continue to scan down through the text rather than reading all of it.
- Engage students in an active way with the text – writing notes is a great way of gathering information from the text. Writing down main points and supporting evidence, capturing the ideas pictorially, writing a response to the ideas, etc.
- Encouraging oral discourse – discussing the reading with peers, teacher or family, the conversation will help to create meaning
- Getting students to reflect - what did they get from the text, does it connect to them in any way, do they need to find out more information, does it spark their interest in learning more?
If you are interested in reading the whole article you can find it using this link.
https://www.kqed.org/mindshift/46426/strategies-to-help-students-go-deep-when-reading-digitally
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