Digital Directions - Winter 2013 - (Page 22)
By_Katie Ash
Reading in the Age of Devices
INTERACT
Games and multimedia in e-books—Companies
are making major strides in incorporating
interactive multimedia into e-books for students of
all ages. A new study by the Campaign for GradeLevel Reading—a collaborative effort by nonprofit
organizations, foundations, and state and local
education officials to increase the number of lowincome students who read at grade level—found
that in a scan of 137 e-books available from iTunes,
almost all (95 percent) provided audio narration.
About a quarter of them allowed students to record
their own voices, and about half highlighted the
words while the story was being narrated so
students could follow along. Sixty-five percent of
e-books had games and activities embedded
within the games. One
example is FableVision’s
Our Books By Us, created
in partnership with
Reading Is Fundamental,
for preschool children. The
child follows a character
named SugarLoaf, who models ways that family
members can incorporate literacy into everyday life.
Students can use their fingers to draw their own
stories along with SugarLoaf throughout the e-book.
22 >> www.digitaldirections.org
SUPPORT
Personalized learning environments—Games, apps, and software that
automatically scaffold instruction to meet students’ ability levels are
becoming increasingly common.
For example, Lexia Learning’s
Reading Core5, which is aligned
with Common Core State
Standards, scaffolds
comprehension questions at the
end of each activity. Each level
of the game has an animated
background, such as an undersea
scene with sea anemones
swaying in the ocean current.
When students are asked the first
question, it appears against the
same background as the rest of the game; if they do not answer correctly, the
screen removes the sea anemones and reduces the number of choices. If they
still do not answer correctly, the game further simplifies the background and
reads the question and answers aloud to the student and provides additional
instruction. Similarly, in the Journeys Common Core Assessment App, created
by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, students are presented with a daily quiz, a
question of the day, and practice questions to reinforce concepts aligned to the
common standards. If students miss a certain number of questions, determined
by the teacher, they receive a digital lesson—a video or game—on the subject
they are struggling with.
CREATE
Story creation—Using voice recordings, animations, and
libraries of photos and drawings, numerous apps now allow
students to create and tell their own stories in digital formats.
Applications like Toontastic, created by Stanford University’s
graduate school of education and Zeum, San Francisco’s
Children’s Museum, allow students to choose from a set of
different scenes to craft a story with a conflict, challenge,
climax, and resolution. The PlayTime Theater app, created by a
company called Make Believe Worlds, allows students to
create a virtual puppet show while recording their voices as the
dialogue. The app records the show so that it can be saved and played back.
Courtesy of Lexia Learning
W
ith the proliferation of tablets,
smartphones, and other mobile
devices, the number of games,
apps, and software to help
students learn to read and increase their
literacy skills is growing fast. And as
technology continues to evolve, those tools
are becoming more interactive, animated, and
sophisticated. Digital Directions has examined
some of the major trends in digital reading
media to help you make smart decisions
about what your schools should use.
http://www.digitaldirections.org
Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Digital Directions - Winter 2013
Digital Directions - Winter 2013
Contents
Editor’s Note
DD Site Visit
Bits & Bytes
Digital Storytelling
Online Courses Turn on Gaming
Reading in the Age of Digital Devices
Movers & Shakers
State, Federal Leadership Seen as Key to Innovation
Open-Source Opportunities
BYOD Boundaries
E-Cloud Forecast
Digital Shift
Security
Digital Directions - Winter 2013
http://dd.edweek.org/nxtbooks/epe/dd_2013summer
http://dd.edweek.org/nxtbooks/epe/dd_2013winter
http://dd.edweek.org/nxtbooks/epe/dd_2012fall
http://dd.edweek.org/nxtbooks/epe/dd_2012springsummer
https://www.nxtbookmedia.com