There is no denying that technology plays a huge role in society today. Children are learning at very young ages how to manipulate different forms of technology, be it an iPad, smartphone, tablet, or computer. I found it very interesting and kind of alarming to learn from our book that children ranging in ages 8-18 spend an average of 90 minutes using the computer at home, and yet 75% of that time is spent on social networking, computer games, and watching online videos. Most children are not using that time to research information beyond what they can access at school, or to further explore what they are interested in. We as teachers need to teach our students how to use the internet to their academic benefit, starting with literacy.
The textbook talks about introducing students to digital texts. Digital texts can be extremely beneficial to students, we just need to teach the students how to properly access and use them. Online read-alouds,online books, and interactive storyboards are a few digital texts that this chapter discussed. I really liked when the chapter explained the online books. I will definitely use this type of digital text in my classroom with my English language learners (as well as my English speaking students)! One of the many collections that online books offer is the International Children's Digital Library, which includes four thousand books in fifty-four languages! English language learners are able to listen to books in their own language and could then listen to the book in English or vice versa.
I enjoyed learning about the different ways in which students can read and manipulate literature online. I know that new technologies will continue to evolve and we must teach our youth to use the internet for educational purposes and not just social networking and gaming. Children now have the opportunity to explore and engage an extremely wide variety of online literature, which will in turn create more fluent readers!
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