Technology And Reading


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Technology And Reading

  1. 1. Technology and Teaching Children to Read by Maryann Albert
  2. 2. Key Questions to Consider about Technology and Teaching Children to Read Is a process established in your school or district for reading specialists, technology specialists, classroom teachers, and special educators to collaborate on reviewing the possibilities and recommending uses of technology to enhance reading instruction? What technologies (hardware and software) are available in your school or district to support reading instruction? How are they currently being used? How are teachers prepared to use them effectively? Which of the five components of effective reading instruction (phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary and comprehension) need to be strengthened in your school or district? Which technologies can enhance these components? How is your school providing reading instruction to students who are reading below their grade levels? ESL students? Special needs students? How can technology support teachers in helping these students? Is information being provided to parents about how technology can help their children learn to read both at school and at home?
  3. 3. The Building Blocks of an Effective Elementary Reading Program Phonemic awareness instruction to help children learn to segment speech into individual sounds (phonemes) and to blend sounds to form words. The ability to work with speech sounds in these ways is an essential foundation for phonics instruction. Phonics instruction to teach children the relationships between sounds and letters. Phonics skills help children recognize words and decode new written words to their spoken words. Fluency instruction to help children learn to read text with speed, accuracy, and proper expression. Fluency is a critical component of learning to comprehend text. Vocabulary instruction to help children learn to read text with speed, accuracy and proper expression. This includes helping children understand that a given word can have different meanings depending upon the context. Text comprehension instruction to help children develop purposeful and active strategies for understanding what they read. These strategies include monitoring children’s understandings as they read, generating and answering questions about the text an summarizing important ideas from the text.
  4. 4. Technology and the Building Blocks for Reading Phonemic Awareness-Multimedia presentation can address many different learning styles by integrating sound, text and moving images. Phonics-Many of the capabilities of computers for phonics instruction overlap those for phonemic awareness. Fluency-Electronic books or e-books present traditional picture book text and images in an alternative on-screen format Vocabulary-Online, interactive vocabulary lessons with the features to engage students, provide feedback, individualize instruction and keep records for teachers. Text Comprehension- Encourage active reading by providing scaffolding options to read words aloud, provide definition, explain concepts in texts and provide visual aids.
  5. 5. Framework for Technology to Support Reading Instruction These four key capabilities, whether supplied by teachers using traditional materials, such as books and audiotapes, or by computers, have proven to be important components in reading instruction. Computers can now provide each of these capabilities to support teaching and learning in new ways: • present information and activities to students • assess students' work • respond to students' work • provide scaffolds, such as access to word pronunciation and definitions, that help students read successfully
  6. 6. Presenting information and activities Multimedia computers can present any type of auditory or visual materials---including speech, text, music, animations, photographs, or videos---alone or in different combinations. They can link different types of representations such as pictures with sounds, oral readings with written text, videos with subtitles, or any other combinations that might reinforce teaching and learning. They can also provide enormous flexibility, allowing the user to set the speed of speech, decide whether written text is also read aloud, choose the language presented in text and speech, or decide whether to repeat the presentation. This flexibility can be valuable in presenting educational tasks to students.
  7. 7. Assessing students' work Computers can be programmed to check a child's work to determine whether he/she selected the correct word or picture, typed a correct word, said the correct word or with recent advances in computerized speech recognition, read a passage fluently. Computers are highly capable of recording and organizing information and reporting that information in multiple formats. Computers can, for example, record the responses of all students in a class to a set of letter-sound matching problems and then immediately report to the teacher the errors made by each individual student and the most common errors made by the entire class. In more complex tasks involving oral reading or text comprehension, computers can serve as convenient recording and reporting devices for teachers, helping them track student progress far more conveniently than other means of data collection. This capability can be used to inform teachers' instructional decisions and to make documenting students' progress more efficient.
  8. 8. Responding to students' work Effective instruction needs to be interactive --- when children respond to questions or read aloud, they need feedback to know whether they are correct, instruction to help them learn more, and opportunities to engage in additional work at appropriate levels to further their learning. When tasks require simple inputs, such as selecting from presented options or typing a word, computers can be programmed to immediately evaluate each response and provide appropriate feedback. This feedback can be in the form of positive messages when the child is correct, and hints, additional chances, or corrected answers when the child is incorrect. Most importantly, computers can be programmed to adjust the task presented to be based on feedback from previous performances. While the ability to have computers understand and respond to students' language in both text and spoken forms has advanced significantly in recent years, it is still far more limited and far less flexible than what a teacher can provide.
  9. 9. Providing scaffolds that help students read successfully Scaffolds for learning to read are analogous to training wheels for a child learning to ride a bicycle. Reading scaffolds let children experience interesting stories on their own, while providing opportunities to continue mastering phonics, vocabulary, fluency, and comprehension. Teachers must also make instructional decisions about when to reduce the scaffolding and have children be responsible for reading without them. Computers can provide powerful scaffolds or "training wheels" for children's reading by presenting information flexibly, assessing students' work, and responding to students. For example, a student with limited phonics skills or vocabulary can benefit from scaffolding in the form of an online speaking dictionary. The role of the computer is to make individualized, responsive scaffolds available for each child by providing, as close as possible, what a teacher would provide when working individually with a student.
  10. 10. Other Potential Benefits of Technology in Reading Instruction Increased Student Motivation-Increased flexibility, supports and responsiveness to students and visual attractiveness of computer – presented hypertext and hypermedia may be valuable to increase a students’ motivation. Reading Management and Assessment Tool-Record books that students read, provide reward that motivates students to read more, provide tests to assess students’ comprehension and provide data to teachers. Word Processing and Reading Instruction-Developed together and reinforces each other Northeast and the Island Regional Technology in Education Consortium. (2004). Technology and Teaching Children to Read. Retrieved from