Reading & Technology

If we want to nurture lifelong readers and thinkers, to cultivate social responsibility, to make reading relevant to the 21st century, and to bring joy to reading, then the status quo will not suffice.

And simply reading a text doesn’t mean students are intellectually engaged. Much of their school reading is done with little thought. They read to get the assignment done as quickly as possible. Why do we perpetuate this school culture of fake reading when our world is filled with so many astonishing things to read?

One of the most disheartening things about the reading students do in school is that it is sopredictable. As students enter their classrooms each day, they al- ready know what they’ll be reading: another novel similar to the last novel, another story out of their lit- erature anthology, another chapter in the social stud- ies textbook, another five-paragraph essay. When they leave school at the end of the day, they know the texts they’ll be reading the following day and the fol- lowing year. How often are students genuinely and happily surprised by a new assigned reading?

expose struggling readers to stimulating content that would be out of reach to them through print alone

interactive nature of the Internet allows readers to choose their own pathways through information in personally relevant and interesting ways.

Computers also can engage students in a powerful way, broadening the opportunities to connect to a world outside school,

Another tool for engagement is WebQuest, a lesson model developed at California's San Diego State University in the mid-1990s in which students embark on a guided inquiry by way of the Internet, beginning with an open-ended problem and culminating in an original solution.

What also needs to be investigated, they say, are ways to teach the sophisticated skills needed to navigate information and communication online.

Without proper supervision, explains Moje, some readers could become dependent on high-tech crutches to understand text.