Blog #8: e-Reader Possibilities

My mom recently purchased an iPad.  She is very tech savvy and media conscious and is always up on her current events.  She, however, rarely sits down to read traditional, long format books and in large part because she is a multi-task oriented person.  She will have her solitaire game in one hand, her Smartphone in her other, while she is reading a magazine.  To ask her to sit down and actually read a book for leisure and non-school related task is like asking a fish to swim/live without water.  However, now with her iPad and her ability to download a book to it and interact with her book, she read 3 books while on vacation for a week.  I am not sure if my mom has read 3 books in 10 years.  I share this to show that if we use e-Readers with our students, we might get them hooked in a totally different way.  In the example of my mom, she wanted to read but didn’t take the time to go look for the book and once she did, it didn’t keep her attention.  I feel like that can be the way with our students sometimes too.  I know if it involves technology, my students are all in and maybe getting them to read things they can interact with or feel like they are using technology to read it, they may actually do the reading we need them to do.  Also, we can ask them to read it away from school and they can pull it up on their Smartphones or tablets and don’t need the hard bound book from class.

Jacki

Spector, J. M., Merrill, M. D., Merrienboer, J. V., Driscoll, M. P. (2008). Handbook of research on educational communications and technology. (3^rd ed.). New York, NY: Routledge Taylor & Francis Group.
Thorsen, C. (2009). Techtactics: Technology for teachers. (3^rd ed.). Boston, MA: Pearson Education Inc.