Disadvantaged Boys and Ebooks

I've always felt that anything that attracts kids to reading it a good thing. From getting them to read books about movies that they have seen, to using their own interests and experiences, and technology. I remember in many of my middle school classes that there were many more girls carrying books to read for themselves than boys. And the study reported here notes that same that: "twice as many boys as girls look at or read online stories for longer than they read traditional books (24 per cent compared to 12 per cent)." It also reminds me about the studies concerning video gaming, that more boys were attracted to those than girls (although there was controversy concerning the types of games created and who they appealed to). One thing that was found out from gaming was that even boys at the time were showing increased communication activity as they talked, wrote, and shared about how to play the game with others. Here is another tech experience that seems to be attracting more boys than girls, but is getting them to read, and is attracting a sub-group that has had poor performance. One possible for success could be the tech attractiveness, but it could also have other elements that could help. The ability of the ebook to adjust the text size alone can help many students just by making the content easier to read. We know that about 20% of elementary students have a print disability, and and one issue that students perform poorly in school is a lack of reading skills and experience, so if this helps, then lets try to get more such devices into all students hands and show them the ways that they can personalize their books for their reading.

Disadvantaged boys learn to pick up an ebook

New technology is unlocking the key to the biggest problem that has been bedevilling the education world for years – the poor performance of white working –class boys in reading. A study reveals that touch-screen technology has switched on to reading three- to five-year-old boys and, more generally, children from disadvantaged homes. 12/1/2014 The Independent http://www.independent.co.uk/news/education/education-news/disadvantaged-boys-learn-to-pick-up-an-ebook-9894498.html

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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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