The new generation of reading

A couple of months ago, in analyzing purchasing trends, it was found that parents were purchasing more print books to digital. And I'm sure that when at a store, children will want that book that they can see. But I do worry about a parent's (or teacher's) preferred text format being the one that they will force on children. After all today's children are growing into a different world than when I was young - they have different print options. For me there was just the size and shape of the book, today there is the etext version, the ipad version, or the paper, and it could be that children might prefer the digital. A recent report from Sesame Street's Joan Ganz Cooney Center (http://www.joanganzcooneycenter.org/) found that kids prefer to ebooks over print books. The "Quick Study" followed 24 families with children (3-6) through the summer and fall of 2011 and found that children reading ebook were retaining and comprehending just as much as when they were reading paper printed book, but that they did prefer the ebooks. I'm not proposing that we stop with paper printed books, just that we should recognize that digital is as effective an option as the printed text. Learning, reading, and doing things in ways that you prefer make the activity more enjoyable. I want every person to have an enjoyable experience when reading, so that hopefully they will want to do it more. Let's all make sure that kids have the options available so that they can read and learn in ways that they like, choosing content they are interested in, to encourage them to read and experience even more. Yes everyone has to read things that they might not choose on their own, but that shouldn't be all that you read, and you should also have the option to read in a format that you like. Let's not treat digital readers like they used to treat left-handed children - forcing them to be right handed, and let's let them read from the format of their choice.

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Auto Summarization

In dealing with textbooks and students with disabilities, one of the most common things that we would do is to get the textbook in a digital format, as an ebook. By doing this we were able to use a number of tools based on the need of the student. I've had students who could not lift their physical printed textbook, but would be able to access though a laptop installed in their electronic wheelchair, for students with vision issues we could boost the font size or use a text-to-speech tool to have the book read aloud to them. One tool that I used with a number of my students who had issues was the Auto Summarize tool in Word. The tool works well with textbook, but wouldn't work for other texts, such as novels. I used this to reduce the amount of text that they had to read, the "cognitive load" of the text, but would still enable be able to get the information. Word did a great job, and depending on the student I would reduce the text to about 66% for facts and support...

Ebooks as Textbooks - Part 2 - Highlighting

Highlighting can be a very effective tool in reading and learning no matter the kind of text being read: from novels to textbooks. Most textbooks or other forms of information text will usually used text features along with graphics to help organize information presented in the text. These elements are done to help focus attention on important or key concepts and provide additional information. The text organization itself can include structural elements such as heading, subheading, index, glossary, paragraph spacing, bulleted or numbered lists, sidebars or side boxes, italics, underlines or bold for words or even sections. Graphic content can include the use of symbols, colors, illustrations, pictures, diagrams, charts, and graphs. Poor highlighting design - too much text has been highlighted. The act of highlighting is less time consuming and much easier than note-taking ( to be discussed in an upcoming posting). To be ...

Ebooks as Textbooks Part 8: Textbook structure

Textbooks usually have a structure, and it doesn't matter if it is an electronic textbook or a paper printed one, the people who put the textbook together usually make it have a structure to help you better understand what you are reading and learning. Textbooks are usually a type of text known as informational or expository text - this is text written to inform, and can be things like textbook chapters, newspaper and magazine articles, and other reference materials like encyclopedia items. The other kind of text that you usually encounter in school is narrative text, where a story is being told - which could be fictional or non-fiction. And while textbooks are informational text, many will also have narrative text, usually as stories to help you better understand the concept, although in an English or literature class the stories are often more the focus of the learning. Textbook Elements With an electronic textbook it might be hard to see the structure, because you cant riffle...

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