Reaching our students—easier or more difficult than before? To answer, go back to your first year of teaching or your freshman year of high school when your teachers were reaching you, or trying to.

In the digital era, we may feel like shouting or at least hitting Caps Lock before responding: more difficult!  The sense of competition with digital tools breeds a kind of exasperation—how do I get my students’ attention, much less sustain it for an entire lesson and string enough of these together to cover the standards?

When we leverage the digital tools that define our students as digital residents and make their tools our tools, we get closer to reaching them at the very least. Michael Smith and Jeffrey Wilhelm have long advocated bringing together in-school and out-of-school literacies (Michael W. Smith, Temple University, Jeffrey D. Wilhelm, Boise State University).

The E-Book Experience

Daily independent reading on wide-ranging topics and across varied genres is a key way our students become proficient readers as they increase vocabulary, and apply metacognitive and comprehension strategies, while gaining information.  This is not news to our ears!  Using e-books can bring together our students’ digital residency with best practices we know that align to balanced literacy.  CAN, but how? In conversations I’ve had with teachers in many school districts, I hear the concerns:

How do we provide students with appropriate texts, matched to their specific reading level with e-books? How do we support students, based on their reading levels so that they engage with text successfully? How do we address accountability?

As reading teachers, these questions haunt us—we want students to have the e-book, digital reading experience they will connect most readily to, but we also demand (rightfully so!) the same care we use to select print texts.

Consider an e-library, with precisely leveled texts, such that a student’s virtual library card provides access only to those texts appropriate to the student, taking reading level and (for our ELLs) language level into careful account.

Customization options in e-books are astounding and make differentiating the e-book experience easy and efficient. The ability to place support through virtual sticky notes on virtual pages at the point of use takes differentiation to a new level. You may have taught the vocabulary strategy of using context clues to determine meaning. So, in the e-book you have assigned to a group of students who need to practice this strategy, you notice the text:

Pourquoi tales often point out character flaws, or foibles, that people have, such as being boastful, proud, or impatient.

How helpful would it be to these students to place a virtual sticky note for them right in the margin that reads: “What is another word for “foible”? Give an example.” Students respond on the virtual sticky note.

With this feature, we serve quite a few “masters”: differentiation, strategy application, and accountability.

So, while the e-book experience may not replace the valuable experiences our students have with print books, they open doors that print books can’t and at the same time motivate and engage students, our digital residents who live in the same digital neighborhood as e-books.

You may enjoy perspectives on e-books from  No Shelf Required as well as author Michael Pastore who has recently written, 50 Benefits of Ebooks, A Thinking Person’s Guide to the Digital Reading Revolution.