EdCircuit Staff 
Written words are motionless and unremarkable when approached by human eyes. They lie on paper in black and white, unmoving. It isn’t very interesting for children, so we have picture books. Still, we expect students to be able to read the boring stuff because some of it has concepts that must be learned in school or professional life. Even a lot of digital curriculum is “flat,” being text-only pages with small amounts of motion by the scroll bar. Can digital reading programs change that?
When reading, the mind must first incorporate motionlessness. If not managed by teaching or a digital method to introduce creative inception reflective of the words (mental visuals), this inertia has a barrier effect to literacy often overlooked. Some minds comprehend words only when “reading” then rises to mean, but to create mental motion visuals and interrelationships to other concepts is the truest literacy. That is a mind that is comprehending dimensionally.
Because of the initial motionlessness of the written word, reading can also start to equate to the reader the rate at which they should think, the same rate as they read and comprehend. This is where inequity of achievement begins. Slow readers are indoctrinated in slow thinking, and down they go. It’s a horrible corollary.
Language is a symbology, both spoken and written, a bridge between us and others, so your rate of using it is a significant indicator of your intelligence, as judged by others. When creative inception is undeveloped through rich teaching of reading to be fast, language itself can become adversarial to learning. It puts a mental slow-down directly. It makes a person look dull and unintelligent just because he or she is a slow reader or talker.
The motionlessness of written words shouldn’t be the first exposure schools give to reading because youth’s attention typically moves about and rarely deflates to a complete stop for flat words on paper. It’s like being on the wrong frequency with them, especially with something they cannot see, hear, touch, or put in their mouths. Getting their attention with black and white paper words after most children today have been exposed to iPhones and iPads since they were 2-year-olds is today like trying to get a teenager to dial a rotary phone with no instructions (one of the most hilarious videos on the web today of 17-year-olds trying just that). Parents and primary teachers can overcome these facts of life by continuing to introduce reading by reading to children with all the added drama they can muster, showing the pictures in the stories, and creating a bit of mystery about the squiggles on the pages that are the words. These might be apparent facts, but what are the new developments in digital reading programs to take literacy success into guaranteed realms of certainty?
A New Answer – Digital Reading Programs
Digital reading programs can come in several flavors. One is book libraries on demand, sometimes enveloped in pre-testing for reading level and a lot of analytics about the reading rate and more like Overdrive and Vitalsource. These are great, but few include programming inside the book to deliver richer content with animations, sound, and graphics that inject life into words. They have the magic of pictures in many books, and they can automagically place the proper literacy leveled books in student libraries so that no student gets discouraged early on by the wrong picks.
Other digital reading programs are within systems that may provide short videos, such as BrainPOP, Awesome Stories, Safari Montage, StrongMind, and many others as inclusive parts of the reading. These are great ways to add interest and successfully invoke meaning.
Finally, there are reading programs such as learning games like Squiggle Park. These typically are the height of code programming skills to render a book passage nearly a virtual interactive world, pacing the reader through a rich mix of animations and sounds that portray the words. Some digital curriculum even allows the student to choose a character they put into the story and pick various ends of the story based on their preferences, like Amplify.
Reading with these levels of meaning can go a long way to interest readers and cause them to imaginatively create mental pictures of what they read when they read flat text. There is much to be said about “teaching by example,” and digital reading programs show great promise in solving the issues of reading to lay a foundation for life-long achievement with every child.
As you review the plethora of options in the App markets and websites, keep in mind that quality digital curriculum reading can and should fluidly incorporate examples of visuals, sounds, screen motion swoops, and more to drive creative inception to then occur by students voluntarily. This is especially true for the younger children, especially if there are reading periods personally assigned and the teacher is not doing the reading aloud to the whole group all the time. Well-illustrated books have always tried to make words less “flat,” but in the digital realm, the lengths to which programmers can go to animate words are enormous.
Schools are well-advised to consider this new magic a key foundation for all their literacy programs.
- edCircuit – Betting on Education’s Long Game
- Idaho Ed News – What’s Working:: Reading Success Stories From Five Idaho Schools
- The Detroit News – Education advocates seek literacy fund to support early readers in Michigan
