The E-books or Print Books Debate – Chuck

What’s Real Reading? The E-books or Print Books Debate

Chuck Sandy
Chuck Sandy
iTDi Community Director

If you want to start an argument among a room full of reading specialists, ask them what reading is and how best to teach it. The reading wars have been raging for decades, and no one has ever really had a correct answer to these questions even in the pre-digital age when books were books and the printed word was all there was. Now in the digital age, the questions have become enormously complicated. What is reading? What actually happens when we read? Does the brain respond differently to flat words on a printed page than it does to hyperlinked words on a digital platform that lead us to interactive graphs, reader reviews, YouTube Videos, and more? Is reading online really reading? Is Google making us stupid?

Although I have spent the greater part of my professional life trying to figure all this out, what really interests me now is why some people become readers while others will openly tell you that they don’t like reading, or even that they don’t read. As a person who can’t leave the house without a bag full of books and a fully loaded Kindle, I find this hard to understand. What do they mean they don’t read, I wonder, and so I ask them. They usually mean books, particularly the kind of books people read in school or for pleasure. Then I wonder how might it be possible to turn non-readers into readers and since this is such an important thing to do, does it really matter whether new reader read printed books or e-books or band fan sites or hotel reviews on the Internet? It’s all reading, right?

My own position is that somehow it’s all reading and that it doesn’t matter what people read as long as they read, and I’ll tell you why later, but right now I’d like you to read what Christina Markoulaki and Barbara Hoskins Sakamoto have to say about e-books and printed books, and how they approach reading in their classrooms. Then I’d like you to go to http://itdi.pro/ and tell us what you think by posting a comment in the E-Books or Print Books Debate. You’ll find my answer there. You’ll need to log-in to the  http://itdi.pro/ site and  thenclick on Forums to get there, but that’s pretty easy to do.

From time to time we’ll feature a debate like this one on the iTDi Blog with the hope that you will join in the discussion. Feel free to respond to any of the points Christina and Barbara make in their thoughtful posts or to any of the questions I’ve raised here. Also, we’d love to know more about what you read and how you read it, but more importantly, what and how do your students read?

If you’d like to do a little more, you might like to conduct a reading survey like the one proposed by Katherine Schulten and Shannon Doyne in their New York Times article on the future of reading.

They suggest “keeping a 24-hour reading journal in which you note everything you read, as well as in what setting and on what device you read it …  At the end of the day, tally how much of what you read was on a device or in a format that didn’t exist 10 years ago. Then ask yourself, which of these reading experiences would you say counts as real reading, and which doesn’t? Why? Do you think your answer would be different than the answer of someone in a different generation?” I’ve been doing this myself throughout the day, starting with the Facebook posts I read soon after getting up this morning, continuing on through the articles I read while writing this, a bit of news here and there in-between,  Christina and Barb’s blog posts which of course led me to other blog posts,  translating the directions I needed to read on a medicine bottle, scanning the lyrics to a song, sorting through a whole bunch of email,  and reading the novel I’ve been enjoying for weeks, a little at time. What I’ve found out is that I read even more than I thought I do.

How about you?

Photo by @aClilToClimb on http://www.flickr.com/photos/eltpics/ 

 

 

The E-books or Print Books Debate – Barb

Judging a book by its cover – Barbara Hoskins Sakamoto

Barbara Hoskins Sakamoto
Barbara Sakamoto
EFT Program Director

I’m a bookworm. One of the greatest challenges for me when I first moved overseas (in the pre-Amazon era) was to keep my home stocked with fresh reading material. On rare visits home, I raided used bookstores and shipped my loot back to Japan by sea mail. The Kindle I bought before my most recent move was one of the best gifts I’ve ever given myself. It feeds my need to read, and removes the anxiety of being caught without a book at hand.

Electronic books and the devices we read them on are great for many reasons — they save trees, they save space, and digital books never go out of print. In short, they represent a great development for voracious readers. However, research suggests that they may not be so great for children who are still learning to read.

Research into what happens when children read and interact with books on a computer screen or on a tablet is still in its infancy, but preliminary findings indicates that e-books, particularly enhanced e-books (where children touch items on the screen to make things happen), may actually interfere with a child’s literacy development.  The goodies that attract children to interact with the screen also distract them from interacting with the text.  There’s a risk that children could end up feeling engaged with books without actually developing the skills to read them.

Becoming a strong, fluent reader requires skills that aren’t easily developed with digital books:

Predicting. We want students to be able to identify genre, or predict what a story will be about by looking at the cover art, “walking” quickly through the pages, or reading the blurb on the back of the book. This is much easier to do with a book that has a cover rather than an icon.

Discovering preferences. We want students to browse bookshelves in order to discover their emerging tastes in literature. Searching an electronic catalog makes us more familiar with the contents of a category, but reduces the chance of a serendipitous discovery on the new arrival shelf at the library.

Skimming and scanning. Students can certainly go to different sections of an e-book or search for keywords, but that’s a different skill. There’s value in quickly flipping through pages to find information or to summarize.

Adjusting reading speed and approach based on the type of text and purpose. E-books are wonderful when our interaction with the content is essentially linear, as in following a story as it unfolds. They’re less than ideal when we need to jump around looking for specific information to answer a homework question or when we’re searching for a citation we vaguely recall seeing in a reference book. For text that explains concepts or provides information, a linear approach to reading is limiting. This may be why college students still prefer ridiculously expensive textbooks rather than the less expensive digital versions.

Aside from skills development, it’s still easier, and more cost-effective to purchase traditional books for a class library. If I purchase from a used bookstore like Better World Books, I’m also saving trees and contributing to literacy charities around the world.

Digital books are engaging; so let them be a reward for children working hard at becoming literate, or a motivator for the reluctant reader. However, let’s make sure our students learn all of the skills they’ll need to enjoy stories as well as story apps, and let’s celebrate their pride in being able to browse the library shelf for a book that looks interesting and say, “I can read it myself!”

 

The E-books or Print Books Debate – Christina

In Favor of E-Books  —  Christina Markoulaki

Christina’s blog post is embedded as a PDF document (scroll with your mouse/trackpad) or as an ebook hosted on issuu.com. If you have problems viewing either, you can view a full-size PDF version → Here

Here’s the issue.com hosted version as ebook:

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Voices from the iTDi Community 4 – Victoria

Victoria Ostankova – Russia

Victoria Ostankova is a teacher living and working in Petropavlovsk-Kamchatski in the Russian Far East.  She works with gifted children at school and online with disabled children across her region. Victoria believes that every child has potential and that it’s our job as teachers to bring that into being.

What are you passionate about, Victoria?

What a tricky question! I’ve devoted all my life to learning and teaching English. You may say it’s easy. Born in the Soviet Union, it was difficult to sustain my motivation and interest in learning English. I remember my friends laughed at me when I was reading the Morning Star, the newspaper of British communists and trade unions. Where else could I find any authentic and modern English texts at that time? But I never gave up. I was in constant search for books, materials and resources that had helped me stay connected to my passion. That time I read Shakespeare, Henry Fielding, Oliver Goldsmith, and Charles Dickens, etc. – all those writers were my best friends. I never look at English as a foreign language. It seemed to be my second native language that I adored so much! Time passed and nothing has changed. However, the World Wide Net gives you ample opportunities to follow your dreams and learn whatever you want. There’s no need to struggle now in finding something new. Everything is open and at your disposal these days. Just go for it and never procrastinate in your professional development.

How and why did you become a teacher?

My passion and hobby gave a way to my profession. Moreover, I’ve always loved working with children. Also, I can say that I followed this profession intuitively or figuratively:  the stars ordered in such a way for me to become a teacher. However, I put so much effort into studying and learning! It was not just a piece of cake, as it seemed at first. Having dreams and living in reality are two differing things. After graduating from the Pedagogical Institute I didn’t go straight to school. Though my schoolteachers said, “she has an innate genius for teaching”, I wanted to become an IDEAL TEACHER.

Interesting, but at a young age, I realized that we needed changes in education. I had a great desire to find something new in educating the younger generation. All this begins with the individual teacher, with my own education and intentions to make the lives of children better. As Aristotle said, “The fate of empires depends on the education of youth”.  I still believe that the aim of education – whether at home, at work, at play, or at school – ought to be the teaching of what we call values, not merely funneling information into empty minds. As Albert Einstein put it: “It is essential that the students acquire an understanding of, and a lively feeling for values of the morally good. Otherwise we – with our specialized knowledge – more closely resemble a well-trained dog than a harmoniously developed person”. Everything we know comes through a process of communicating and sharing. Whoever these people are – parents, teachers, philosophers – we are what our education makes us. So, I was hungry for more and more knowledge after my graduation. I didn’t have any ‘moral right’ to go to school and teach students without anything to share.

Anyway, experience is the best teacher. That’s why I started participating in all possible conferences and workshops for teachers. My practical goal was and still is to develop and cultivate my professional teaching skills. It first started with participation in the American Values through Media CD-ROM publication project. Then came the online course Methods I: Survey of Best Practices in TESOL. Also, I attended numerous webinars and delivered lots of teacher training sessions. I want to conclude here by saying that ‘teachers are born not made’ because what I’ve learned from the online courses I’ve taken or books I’ve read, I already knew intuitively and subconsciously. Have you ever had the feeling when starting a book that you know exactly what it will be about? The same is teaching for me.

What are you most interested in right now, VIctoria?

I could give you a long list of all things I am doing and am interested in right now. I guess it’s in my nature to be multitasking.  As I work with gifted children right now, I must cater to their academic needs and bright intelligences. This group of students has a specific mindset with well-developed cognitive and metacognitive abilities, so I have to be competent enough to teach and reach all of them. I am glad that the administration of my school trusts me completely and that I am free to choose any material or book I consider to be beneficial for my students. Thus, I’ve made a decision to design the syllabi myself and pick up materials for my gifted learners. I know I must present a lot of educational information to my learners within the limited period of time and teach them how to speak, comprehend, read and write in English. I strive to empower and equip them with learning strategies that will help them succeed in their studies. Now, I also spend more time learning new things to incorporate technology tools into my teaching and learning process, as well as observe the valid rationale of practical and pedagogical uses of technology. Moreover, this year I will be an online tutor for disabled children in my region. As an online tutor, I will try to motivate these special students to grow further and never settle for less.

What’s the biggest challenge you face as a teacher?

My biggest challenge is assessment. I don’t understand the standards of assessment and testing. Who made up all these standards which make our learners feel stressed or even distressed oftentimes? Learning is a lifelong process; we are learning something new every day. What is the point of assessment then? Ministers who never step their foot into the classroom give us tips on how to raise bars and meet national standards. It’s a pity that they mention criteria and never tell about reaching students’ potential. Each student just needs a special route to the destination. Some learners get there faster than others, but they ALL will get there. It takes time and patience.  I am happy that my school implements a curriculum in which assessment is informal. We use informal observations, portfolios, and running records to track academic growth of our students. Using rubrics as an assessment tool is considered to be informal as well. By evaluating students by rubrics and by giving feedback to them, we teach our students to plan, monitor and evaluate their own progress and accomplishments. Grading policy is not provided at our school. We observe learners’ achievements and progress during English Olympiads and Linguistic Contests.

What advice would you give a teacher just starting out a journey of professional development?

Listen to your learners and let them voice their opinion. Ask for some kind of feedback. Learners are always helpful in giving constructive feedback. When you teach, try to motivate students and share with them what you know about the world and life. Don’t be too overbearing; guide them to let them find and then discover their own path in life. As Audrey Koh said, “Every child has potential. It’s the teacher’s job to have a keen eye of what each child’s potential is and how to polish it until it shimmers”. So I may add: Never rush into conclusions but observe children’s potential with a ‘keen eye’.

Victoria, is there any blog or online link you’d like to recommend?

I’d like to recommend Shaping the Way We Teach English  http://shapingenglish.ning.com/. You can find lots of resources and materials there for your professional development. This ning site is frequently updated with new webinars and various topics on pedagogy and methodology. It’s moderated and supported by extremely devoted teachers and material designers.

I would love everybody to communicate with the whole world and to engage your students into it as well. I like some of the British Council’s international projects that unite schools all over the world. Some of these projects include Schools Online http://schoolsonline.britishcouncil.org/  Global Gateway http://schoolsonline.britishcouncil.org/Global-Gateway Connecting Classrooms http://schoolsonline.britishcouncil.org/accreditation-and-awards/International-School-Award and eLanguages   http://schoolsonline.britishcouncil.org/node/4

Is there anything else you’d like to say?

Oscar Wilde once said, “Education is an admirable thing, but it’s well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught”. It’s up to us to decide what teaching is for us: art or science or maybe a combination of both? I believe we should always know what and how to teach and always feel how to reach our students’ potential and hearts.