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Computer reading software programs give the student the opportunity to manipulate text and have words and sentences presented in a way that makes learning the sounds and words easier. Teachers are better able to individualize reading instruction by having the ability to construct customized reading materials. Children with visual impairments and visual processing difficulties can have larger sized text and extra spacing between words. Text can be repeated as often as necessary and the rate or pace of speech can be adjusted for students with auditory processing difficulties. The use of graphics, sound, and animation can help to motivate and encourage children to complete reading tasks more successfully.

Creative writing programs can help stimulate children’s creativity and make them more successful at writing stories and assignments. Word prediction programs are available and can offer students help with spelling, word finding, and auditory processing difficulties. Good writing programs include features such as text-to-speech with male and female voices, the ability to enlarge text, different font choices, the use of color coding and highlighting, spell checkers and grammar and punctuation dictionaries.

Computer-aided writing software can assist students with handwriting and other expressive writing problems. Talking word processing programs can make writing tasks easier for students with learning disabilities

The ease with which young people communicate, though, can help in advancing literacy in a digital age.

"People are often concerned that technology will detract from students' literacy skills, but it is important to look at all the new things we can do to support literacy and learning," said Alyssa Wise, assistant professor in Simon Fraser University's faculty of education, who works with the program on educational technology and learning design.

"You can think about it as new forms of literacy," she said. "It is important to think about the ways computers can help students become more literate. Computers enable us to do much more."

A decade ago, access to technology was limited and wiring schools was one of the nation's highest education priorities. Ten years of substantial investments have vastly improved this picture. According to the Secretary's Fourth Annual Report on Teacher Quality, virtually every school with access to computers has Internet access (99%), compared to only 35 percent of schools in 1994, according to the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) (Parsad & Jones, 2005). Public schools have also made consistent progress in expanding Internet access in instructional rooms, according to NCES. In 1994, 3 percent of public school instructional rooms had Internet access, compared with 93 percent in 2003. And between 1998 and 2003, the student-to-connected-computer ratio went from 12-to-1 to 4.4-to-1. Along with expanded access has come a growing pervasiveness of technology in society. For a generation of young people, technology, particularly the Internet, has assumed a substantial stake in their social and educational lives. A recent survey conducted by the Pew Internet & American Life Project (Hitlin & Rainie, 2005) found that roughly 21 million youth between the ages of 12 through 17—approximately 87 percent of the entire age bracket—use the Internet. Of those 21 million online teens, 78 percent (about 16 million students) say they use the Internet at school. This translates into 68 percent of all teenagers, up from 47 percent in 2000. The survey also found that most teens believe that the Internet helps them do better in school (86 percent of teens, 88 percent of online teens).

Literacy skills have always been important. In centuries past, people communicated via letters. These letters soon turned into telegraph messages. From there we advanced to the telephone, internet and then text messaging via a phone. Today's options for communication far outweigh the one or two of generations pasts. "Children learn these skills as part of their lives, like language, which they learn without realizing they are learning it." (N. Andersen, New Media and New Media Literacy: The Horizon Has Become the Landscape—New Media Are Here,; report produced by Cable in the Classroom, 2002, pp. 30–35) Students today learn in ways that their teachers could not even imagine decades ago when they were in school. Students learn technology just like they do the spoken language, by doing and today it is not uncommon for a 3 year old to have some basic knowledge regarding how to get on to the computer and load a game (hopefully educational). The way students learn and their abilities to showcase their learning has surpassed the years of book reports, posters, and shoe box representations. "We will not be able to achieve a liberating, collective intelligence until we can achieve a collective digital literacy, and we have now, more than ever, perhaps, the opportunity and the technologies to assist  us in the human project of shaping, creating, authoring and developing ourselves as the formers of our own culture. To this end, we must create the conditions for people to become wise in their own way."  (Poore, M. (2011). Digital Literacy: Human Flourishing and Collective Intelligence in a Knowledge Society. Australian Jouranal of Language and Literacy, 19 (2),20-26.)

Digital literacy is one component of being a digital citizen - a person who is responsible for how they utilize technology to interact with the world around them.Digital technology allows people to interact and communicate with family and friends on a regular basis due to the "busy constraints" of today's world.Not only do white-collar jobs require digital literacy in the use of media to present, record and analyze data, but so do blue-collar jobs who are looking for way to increase productivity and analyze market trends, along with increase job safety.

The best method the government can use to improve literacy rates in America is to advance the system of education and education technology. Of course advancing the education system isn't as simple as it sounds. Increasing the budget on education and education technology is a good start but without a proper plan then there is a possibility that the increased budget will only provide disappointing results. The first priority should be researching the effectiveness of schools when it comes to increasing literacy rates so that the government can find out if the teaching methods should be revised. There is also the possibility that some schools aren't accessible to the poor and that the government needs to provide financial support. This is the reason why thorough research is needed before advancing further into the plan. After adequate information is gathered, the Department of Education can devise a nationwide plan to enhance the education system.

People can also make good use of education and education technology to reduce the number of illiterates in America. The internet can be used as a great tool to promote learning since it has such a wide range. Almost everyone has access to the internet and if it is utilized properly, it can spread literacy advocacies like wildfire. This can be done quite easily by using the popularity of social networking websites to speed up the process of spreading information. If enough people are made aware of the literacy problems in America then it will make the task of improving literacy rates easily achievable.

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Technology, such as the Internet and Web 2.0 tools, makes it easier for teachers to tap into students’ interests and personalize what they are reading, he says.

The Internet allows her students to engage with an authentic audience, says Parisi, which motivates them to record podcasts or write blogs that are more polished than what they might create for just the teacher.

And using technology also provides an opportunity to teach other kinds of literacies, such as digital and media literacy, says Van Sluys.

Technology is changing literacy, claim Web 2.0 advocates, university researchers, edgy librarians, pundits of the blogosphere, and the media. The visual is ascendant, text is secondary—and linearity? Forget about it. Web surfers flip from one information wave to another, gathering and synthesizing. Beginning, middle, and end are up for grabs.

Now, Kamil notes, newer and better technology is coming out all the time to make the option of classroom technology even stronger, especially for struggling readers and writers. He points to advances in speech recognition technology, such as Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh's research-based Reading Tutor project or programs such as Pearson's Quick Reads, as examples of tools that can improve students' reading fluency.

According to MacArthur, word-prediction software, which generates lists of potential words as students type initial letters into the computer, can also help students dramatically improve the legibility and spelling of their writing. In a 2006 article in the Handbook of Writing Research, "The Effects of New Technologies on Writing and Writing Processes," he explains that his series of three studies of 9- and 10-year-olds with severe spelling problems showed that these students' legible words increased from 55 to 85 percent, and their correctly spelled words rose from 42 to 75 percent.

In fact, some literacy experts say that online reading skills will help children fare better when they begin looking for digital-age jobs.

Web proponents believe that strong readers on the Web may eventually surpass those who rely on books. Reading five Web sites, an op-ed article and a blog post or two, experts say, can be more enriching than reading one book.

Some literacy experts say that reading itself should be redefined. Interpreting videos or pictures, they say, may be as important a skill as analyzing a novel or a poem.

"Moderate amounts of television viewing were found to be beneficial for reading," states Annie Moses in the Journal of Early Childhood Literacy, further stating that "programs that aim to promote literacy in young children have been found to positively impact specific early literacy skills".

Moses found in a broad review of past studies and publications in the field, that children with a moderate amount of age appropriate exposure to television (even from a very young age) actually have better literacy outcomes, with no detectable difference in emotional stability or overall development.

In this age of digital cable, satellite TV, and public television programming ripe with educational programs, parents have a large variety of material to choose from when selecting programs for their children.

People think that the written language seen on mobile phone screens is new and alien, but all the popular beliefs about texting are wrong. Its graphic distinctiveness is not a new phenomenon, nor is its use restricted to the young. There is increasing evidence that it helps rather than hinders literacy.

Texting has added a new dimension to language use, but its long-term impact is negligible. It is not a disaster.

The fact that texting is a relatively unstandardised mode of communication, prone to idiosyncrasy, turns out to be an advantage in such a context, as authorship differences are likely to be more easily detectable than in writing using standard English.

technology as an independent variable, were aimed at kindergarten-age students, included early literacy development, and were published after 2001.

There is positive evidence of the role of technology in supporting early literacy acquisition for this age group. In a majority of the studies used in the analysis, there was a lack of attention paid to the role of the teacher. The specific study outcomes may be promising but they may also be more difficult to replicate without this information.

First, technologies have affordances and constraints making them more or less useful in different circumstances

Before there were cameras, computers, or even books, stories held the knowledge of all civilization

In this age of multimedia, a new kind of storytelling has emerged. Digital Storytelling takes the art of storytelling and adds elements of sound, video, and photo images to create a multi-dimensional tale that draws the reader into the story. It's an excellent tool to encourage students to take their writing to a new level as well as a way to bring technology into your curriculum.