Serialize that Book

If someone prefers a certain medium over another, should not we as teacher then try to incorporate that medium as a learning or teaching tools/style to engage the student? Once we have them engaged, then we can expand the concept or relate it to another medium form. Back when I taught science, I used all kinds of science materials, labs, activities, field trips, anything to get them interested in the subject, so that they would want to learn. I also used books and films to teach, as many students were reading and they all went to the movies or watched TV (even the ones who were not reading). By using the film as an anchor for learning and then expanding it to more than just watching a film, but to also having discussions, finding out about the accuracy of the film and then doing labs based on what they saw, I was better able to engage my students in learning science, and show them that it didn't just have to be something that occurred in science class.

Now with this study, some may read and just see the negative, but the book avoidance isn't anything new. The reading decline that occurs for most students around age ten isn't anything new. But instead look at what they are interested in. What we need to do is make sure that they are finding reading to be an enjoyable activity and one that can fit within their lives (and the tools they use). So consider if we started texting or emailing students high interest ebooks, a bit at a time. This is behind the idea of sites like DailyLit (http://www.dailylit.com), DripRead (http://www.dripread.com/), Dear Reader (http://www.dearreader.com/), and even Harlequin did this for a while. The idea behind the sites is to break up the book into about 5 minute reading segments, which are emailed to the reader on a regular basis. While Dear Reader only give you excepts to get you interested in a book, DripRead and DailyLit will deliver the whole book a bit at a time. DripRead even allows its members to upload their own books to have them delivered this way. So if children prefer to read on their mobile phones and they want short amounts to read, we can start to deliver books to them in that way, although they will still need to be books that are interesting to them! To get them hooked on reading we have to provide them books that they will enjoy so that they keep coming back, we need to start with something more like Iron Man than the Piano. What used to get kids into the movies every week, may also be able to get them more interested in reading.

Children choose technology over books, study finds
A British study that involved more than 18,000 children ages 8 to 17 found that text messages were the preferred form of reading material, followed by e-mail and social networking sites such as Facebook. The frequency of book reading correlated inversely with age, with those ages 14 to 16 more than 10 times as likely to avoid books altogether as children in primary education, researchers found. The Telegraph (London) (8/22)