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students performed equally well on a twenty-question multiple-choice comprehension test whether they had read a chapter on-screen or on paper. Given a second test one week later, the two groups’ performances were still indistinguishable.

“We cannot go backwards. As children move more toward an immersion in digital media, we have to figure out ways to read deeply there.”

Maybe her letter writers’ students weren’t victims of digitization so much as victims of insufficient training—and insufficient care—in the tools of managing a shifting landscape of reading and thinking.

In a new study, the introduction of an interactive annotation component helped improve comprehension and reading strategy use in a group of fifth graders. It turns out that they could read deeply. They just had to be taught how.

multitasking while reading on a computer or a tablet slowed readers down, but their comprehension remained unaffected.

Maybe the decline of deep reading isn’t due to reading skill atrophy but to the need to develop a very different sort of skill, that of teaching yourself to focus your attention.

There’s a very narrow band of writing that is assessed in schools, and a lot is at stake on that narrow field. So the question is how do we balance helping young people do well in assessment contexts with the other stuff that might actually take them fuarther in the world?

You mentioned earlier about teachers needing to have digital lives—why is that important to connected learning? We don’t want to just say to educators, “You do these fives steps and you’ll have active, enquiring learners.” That’s forgetting that the teacher is also a learner. We think if we have active, enquiring, connected, engaged adults, they’ll transfer that culture or learning and inquiry to young people.

How do we link what we’re learning about the creative opportunities in new digital environments to how people engage and learn in their communities and in society at large?

Most students and adults write far more in a given day than they did just 10 or 20 years ago, choosing to write to one another over social media or text message instead of talking on the phone or visiting.

Because they achieve automaticity quicker on the keyboard, today’s third graders may well become better writers as handwriting takes up less of their education. Keyboards are a boon to students with fine motor learning disabilities, as well as students with poor handwriting, who are graded lower than those who write neatly, regardless of the content of their expressions. This is known as the “handwriting effect,” proved by Steve Graham at Arizona State, who found that “when teachers are asked to rate multiple versions of the same paper differing only in legibility, neatly written versions of the paper are assigned higher marks for overall quality of writing than are versions with poorer penmanship.” Typing levels the playing field.

In fact, the changes imposed by the digital age may be good for writers and writing.

The more one writes, the better a writer one becomes

The kids will be all right.

There will be no loss to our children’s intelligence. The cultural values we project onto handwriting will alter as we do, as they have for the past 6,000 years.