Skip to main content

Try the Settings - Find your Goldilocks Zone

This last semester I was teaching a graduate technology and literacy course. As part of that course all my students were to do some action research. We did get some great results, for example one student’s work on using refreshable braille display for elementary children which saw an improved fluency of 4-5 letters per minute over those just using embossed paper, and another student I was working with developed her project on guided writing, saw an overall writing increase of 50% in just a few weeks using Google Docs as a writing system tool. The one though that I wanted to talk about here though was one student who was doing his action research on himself, to try and get better at reading from an ebook. He does great with paper, but found that he had trouble focusing with reading with technology. In his final report he had a number of things that he found that are of interest:

 "During this process I learned that I read materials online a lot more then I originally thought. I read the news online, emails at work, trainings at work, text messages from people, and post on social media."

 "In fact, the only thing I was not using technology for was reading books. "

 "I however believe that through this action research project I have learned ways to combat my problems of focusing in the reading. The biggest factor that helped me was changing the font size of what I was reading. "

 "The thing that helped me the most was all the practice I put into reading materials online or on a tablet."


I do agree that most people don't realize how much of what they read now is digital, and they often seem to think that reading from their phone or tablet is so different from a printed book. But in the analysis of his findings I do think that the impact of practice and going beyond the "set" or "default" font was a big help. So many people think that just because they can be comfortable with one medium/tool that the other should just be the same, but it takes practice. I often tell people who are starting to use audiobooks, it it will take some practice to get used to reading through listening, that they should start with a book that they have already read and liked, and that they should limit themselves to something less than half and hour till they get better at it. The big thing though is the font, so many people I interact with when I see them reading and I ask if they have ever changed the font or font size, say no. Because of the practice that we have all had with printed material makes it so that we don't think about the print options we have with digital. So to anyone who is reading a book on a tablet or other ereader, take a moment to try some different font sizes and find one that is just right for you.


Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

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.
The act of highlighting is less time consuming and much easier than note-taking (to be discussed in an upcoming posting). To be effective in highlighting it should be a kind of metacognitive approach of sifting or filtering to identify the important content…
1 comment
Read more

Ebooks as Textbooks Part 6 - Taking Note

The process of taking notes, makes reading that much more of an active process and will aid in comprehension and retention. The addition of your own personal notes are usually easier to understand and remember than textbook material. As a student reads the textbook, he or she may not remember all of that they read when they have finished - this is especially true of very dense texts. But, if a student reads the information and also writes down notes about what he or she is reading at the same time, then that extra step reinforces that information and improves retention. So one of the best ways to retain information you are reading it is to take notes while you are actually reading it, for print books these notes were usually written in the margins of the text and so were called margin notes. 

The taking of margin notes is a strategy that focuses your attention on important information from the textbook, novels, or articles that you are reading. Because it involves tagging key words or …
1 comment
Read more

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 suppor…
9 comments
Read more