My First EdWeek Blog Post - Is Your District Missing the Digital Literacy Boat?

I am thrilled to announce that I have been given the opportunity to Blog regularly for Education Week. You can check out my EdWeek blog here. My first post , which you can read below, was posted on Tuesday. 

In many ways, today represents an unprecedented opportunity to advance student literacy! With tablets, e-readers, and mobile phones, you can literally carry endless shelves of excellent books in your pocket. In addition, education technology offers breakthrough tools to help teachers raise the literacy bar. Yet numerous factors hamper schools' abilities to bring these benefits into our classrooms.

When it comes to purchasing and utilizing digital books, confusion reigns among educators. Lacking a good understanding of this fast-changing space, I see educators making short-term decisions about the transition to digital books and building ebook libraries without plans for instructional use. Perhaps worst of all, I see districts staying on the sidelines, delaying purchases of ebooks because the options seem too murky to fully understand.   

I believe we need to amplify the national conversation about this critical subject. As a district administrator, I want to highlight three under-recognized points: (1) the emergence of educational technology that can dramatically improve literacy outcomes in schools, (2) the cost-effective options for bringing digital books into schools, and (3) the funding challenges involved in making these new tools available to all students. Let's address ebook purchasing first.

Best Bang for the District Buck

Some digital book options are simply better for schools than others. Unfortunately, the landscape is not well-understood among school and district leaders. Here is what an informed purchaser should know:

Ebooks for schools are often available from publishers in an "in-perpetuity" purchase model. This means that a school or district purchases the book once and owns it forever. The book will never wear out, be written in, or lost, which saves money in the long term. Such ebooks typically cost more than paperback books, and can sometimes cost more than hardback or library-bound books. For example, when purchased from Follett, Lois Lowry's The Giver costs $7.69 in paperback, $15.34 in hardback, and $8.99 for an in-perpetuity ebook. Seymour Simon's Extreme Earth Records costs $6.84 in paperback, $15.34 in hardback, and $16.89 digitally - also in perpetuity. Especially for school libraries, the indestructible, impossible-to-lose digital book is clearly the best long-term value.

Some schools purchase ebooks from providers like Amazon or iBooks because the price tag sounds attractive: The Giver costs $2.99 on Amazon and iBooks, and Extreme Earth Records costs $9.99. Yet those ebook licenses are intended for consumers - and thus are limited to one user account - so these ebooks can't be shared across a school or classroom with any ease. Only two students need to read Extreme Earth Records for the $16.89 Follett ebook to be a better value than the $9.99 Amazon or iBooks purchase. Similarly, after the third read of The Giver, the school saves by purchasing the ebook. Why, then, do schools still buy from Amazon and iBooks? Usually, I find it boils down to misunderstanding the options.

Some ebook licenses allow multiple students to access an ebook simultaneously, making those texts very cost-effective for whole class work. Cheetahs by Tammy Gagne - which is $20.54 in hardcover - costs $20.49 for an in-perpetuity ebook which can be read one student at a time, and $30.74 for an "unlimited access" license, which could be used by an entire school simultaneously (and again, in perpetuity). At this price, the unlimited-use ebook is more affordable than a class set of any text!

As these examples illustrate, in-perpetuity ebook licenses, which are available to schools through suppliers like Follett or Baker & Taylor, represent the best long-term value for digital books. In many cases, they may even represent a better value than physical texts, especially for classroom-wide use. Yet evidence suggests that educators are still learning these options: in a recent survey featured in School Library Journal, 40% of school and district leaders said they are still unsure which ebook purchase model makes the most sense for their district.

The Challenge of Funding the Digital Transition

If the long-term value of most ebooks is good news, the bad news revolves around the disconnect between classroom needs and district budgeting:

• Instructional realities: To take advantage of ebooks in the classrooms, teachers need quality classroom libraries and class sets of texts. Teachers can't leverage new technologies with a few students reading digitally and the rest in a paperback, so a piecemeal approach won't work - schools need funds to replace book closets with ebook libraries. Yet schools budget to replace a portion of their books each year, not to build new libraries from scratch. A swift digital transition is challenging for schools, whose budgets aren't designed to absorb one-time costs.
• Tapped budgets: Districts, pushed to increase their capabilities to handle computer-based testing, have invested heavily in digital devices, costly peripherals such as keyboards, and wireless infrastructure, leaving limited funds for the content and software needed to support digital reading initiatives.

These factors must be brought to the attention of school communities, parents, and philanthropists. Fortunately, efforts to increase students' access to digital books have gained attention through President Obama's ConnectED initiative and articles such as Jim Duncan and David Rothman's recent Education Week commentary calling for a national digital-library endowment. I would add to the calls for philanthropic support, which will be necessary for schools to tap the promise of digital books.  

Unprecedented Instructional Opportunities Using Ebooks

While these challenges delay the transition to digital, our schools are missing out on significant instructional opportunities. The education technology market is currently producing tools that can dramatically alter literacy instruction through the use of ebooks in the classroom. Tools likeLightSail, myOn, and Actively Learn are engaging readers in ways that are impossible with physical books while also providing realtime feedback to educators and students.

In my district, we use LightSail, a literacy platform that assesses students while they read digital books such as Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and The Book Thief. Based on the assessments, teachers see student progress across a number of metrics, including a daily update of students' Lexile measures. The software calculates actual reading time, so we accurately know the volume of reading done by each student, and we can correlate reading time with reading performance. Teachers also see student annotations--the kind formerly recorded in reading journals--in real time. By using this tool, our teachers are personalizing and fine-tuning instruction in ways that cannot be replicated with a physical book.

Such classroom tools are true "game changers" for literacy instruction, supporting literacy outcomes in our schools that were previously unimaginable--and the technology keeps improving. But to capitalize on these opportunities, we need to determine how we will ensure the necessary funding to provide all students with access to these tools.

Some Recommended Reading On Reading

Photo via http://res.freestockphotos.biz/

A group of us here in Burlington Public Schools spent a couple of days in a workshop last week that was focused on reinforcing comprehension skills.  The sessions were led by Shauna Cotte from Keys To Literacy which is based in Rowley, MA.

During the second day of the session, Shauna shared some books with the group that she saw as required reading.  Check out the list below and feel free to pass along any that you would add in the comment section:

Read Aloud Handbook - Jim Trelease

The Defense of Read Aloud - Steven Layne

Readicide: How Schools are Killing Reading and What You Can Do About It - Kelly Gallagher

The Book Whisperer - Donnalynn Miller

The Power of Reading - Stephen Krashen

Reading Reasons, Kelly Gallagher

How Children Succeed - Paul Tough

I Think It's Obvious Why College Students Prefer Real Books

If this is how you grew up reading, what would your preference be? (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Earlier this week the The Washington Post ran a story titled Why digital natives prefer reading in print. Yes, you read that right. Every time I see one of these stories it makes me think a bit about why this is the case. It actually amazes me that people are so surprised that "Digital Natives" prefer real books to e-books. The fact of the matter is the in the case of this article, we are talking about college students who have spent more than a decade completing their reading in real books and having educators assign work from real books.  Just because they now have access to e-textbooks and/or e-books does not mean that they will choose to abandon the workflow they have used for their entire educational career. Why are we surprised by this? 

In Burlington for instance, we handed out iPads four years ago and our current seniors have had iPads for their entire high school careers. Yet, we have not seen a seismic shift in the amount of reading that has moved away from traditional books. Again, is this a shock? Given that these students had done almost all of their reading through eighth grade in a traditional format, I think not. Do I think that our elementary students will feel the same way? No, I think we will start to see more of a split in the choice by students in regards to a preference of reading online vs. reading traditional books.

The Only Way To Get Students Comfortable With E-Reading

The major problem in regards to seeing some of the unique aspects of reading online is to have students guided through the process and shown some of the things a reader can do digitally that they cannot do with a traditional book. Unfortunately, this is still something that many educators are uncomfortable with or unwilling to try. Personally, I love reading online and the fact that I can click on hyperlinks, bookmark key points/articles, and interact with others interested in the same topic/novel. In fact, we have had a pilot in our middle school this year using LightSail that has shown some indications of success. (I'll write more about this later).

The point here is that we need to give students access to all of the tools and resources that can help them engage with whatever they are reading and then let them choose what works best for them. The key part of whether students choose to read traditionally or online is choose to read.  We need to encourage reading and discussion about reading with our students and help them on a pathway that will help them enjoy this lifelong journey. The only mistake in this whole conversation is to micromanage the decision.

Embrace the Struggle

We need to embrace the struggle that is part of this and have meaningful conversations to guide our own learning and the learning of our children.

Denying these opportunities benefits no one! 

Related articles

• Another Defensive Post About e-Reading (patrickmlarkin.com)
• I Am Right! A Follow-up To My Rant About Online Reading (patrickmlarkin.com)

Another Defensive Post About e-Reading

various e-book readers. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Disclaimer: As an administrator in a district where we have provided iPads for all students, I always feel a bit defensive about articles and research studies that are quick to dismiss e-reading in lieu of traditional books. This is especially true when I am quoted in one of the articles.

Caitlin Dewey produced another take on the merits of e-reading in yesterday's Washington Post in her article titled "Why you might want to ditch your e-reader and go back to traditional books."  Dewey's piece highlights a study out of Italy that was highlighted in the Guardian this week where 50 people were asked to read a short story, half of the group on a Kindle and the other half out of a book. The findings here were that the overwhelming majority of the participants who read on the Kindle remembered less of the story than those who read it from a book.

As is usually the case with these types of studies, I have some questions I need answered to help me understand the findings of this study:

• How many of these Kindle readers had done reading electronically before?
• What was the mindset of these people about reading electronically?

The fact of the matter is that only two of the Kindle readers had experience reading on the Kindle, a fact that this story seemed comfortable glossing over. I am a bit at a loss as to how such a significant matter can be considered insignificant. It seems straightforward to me that people tend to perform better in an environment in which they are more comfortable.  I am wondering when I will see a study done with a group of people who consider themselves strong e-readers and face them off with a group of "luddites."

Here's my key takeaway from this article:

"Anne Mangen, the lead author of the new Kindle study, says more research will be needed to determine which devices should be used for what content and which populations benefit from each. It’s also unclear to what extent readers’ own attitudes affect their comprehension; one line of research posits that, as iPads and Kindles become more mainstream, people will approach text on those devices a little more thoughtfully."

I am left with the same conclusion that I had back in April when I wrote A Rant On Reading Online vs. Reading Paper.

Why is it that as we seek the best way to accomplish a task, we cling to the false belief that we are going to find one right answer? Personally, I love reading online and the fact that I can click on hyperlinks, bookmark key points/articles, and interact with others interested in the same topic/novel. Am I distracted or adding a level of interaction to this task that was not possible for previous generations of readers?  

Of course, the answer here is that sometimes I am distracted and less productive and other times I am able to utilize the online resources in a way that adds greater depth to my experience.  My main problem with the alarmists who would prefer that all students read paperbound texts is that they deny these students opportunities to experience the power of Interactive reading, as well as the chance to find their own individual sense of balance in this area.  We need to embrace the struggle that is part of this and have meaningful conversations to guide our own learning and the learning of our children.

Denying these opportunities benefits no one! 

Related articles

• A Great Way To Approach Technology - "Pause -- Think -- Crawl -- Walk -- Run." (patrickmlarkin.com)
• I Am Right! A Follow-up To My Rant About Online Reading (patrickmlarkin.com)

I Am Right! A Follow-up To My Rant About Online Reading

The future of books (Photo credit: Johan Larsson)

On Monday, I posted some thoughts regarding an article from last week's Washington Post that was titled Serious reading takes a hit from online scanning and skimming, researchers say.  I was excited to see a rebuttal to Michael Rosenwald's perspective by his Washington Post colleague Valerie Strauss this week. 

In her article, Actually, online skimming probably hasn’t affected serious reading after all, Strauss notes the skepticism of Daniel Willingham, a cognitive scientist from the University of Virginia. Here is a bit of what Willingham had to say:

"… teachers aver that students can no longer read long novels. Well, if we’re swapping stories, I — and most of my classmates — had a hard time with Faulkner and Joyce back in the early ‘80s, when I was an English major."

"A more plausible possibility is that we’re not less capable of reading complex prose, but less willing to put in the work. Our criterion for concluding, “this is boring, this is not paying off,” has been lowered because the Web makes it so easy to find something else to read, watch, or listen to...If I’m right, there’s good news and bad news. The good news is that our brains are not being deep-fried by the Web; we can still read deeply and think carefully. The bad news is that we don’t want to."

While I find Willingham's feelings on online reading versus more traditional means more palatable than those cited in Rosenwald's artilce, my conclusion is still the same. There is no one right answer! We need to embrace the struggle between reading online and reading from paper-based products. Forcing our students to do one or the other denies them the opportunity to see the benefits that each has to offer.  In addition, there needs to be an increased focus on the advantages of online tools so that students can meet more modern standards of literacy, like the ones below described by the National Council of Teachers of English in its Definition of 21st Century Literacies:

Develop proficiency and fluency with the tools of technology; 

Build intentional cross-cultural connections and relationships with others so to pose and solve problems collaboratively and strengthen independent thought; 

Design and share information for global communities to meet a variety of purposes; 

Manage, analyze, and synthesize multiple streams of simultaneous information; 

Create, critique, analyze, and evaluate multimedia texts; 

Attend to the ethical responsibilities required by these complex environments.

A Rant On Reading Online vs. Reading Paper

ebook-vs-libros (Photo credit: melenita2012)

About a week back the Washington Post ran an article titled Serious reading takes a hit from online scanning and skimming, researchers say.  Immediately, I saw a number of tweets from people touting the article as a groundbreaking piece of research.  (I'll provide my own hyperbole alert since this is online and the research says readers may just skim over this).

Anyway, just a close reading of the title would have tipped folks off that this article was nothing significant.  The keywords of course being "researchers say" in the headline which is a far cry from "researchers prove."  As I scanned and skimmed the article numerous times other phrases popped out at me, phrases like the following:

"I worry.."

"comprehension seems better...with paper" 

"Researchers say that the differences between text and screen reading should be studied more thoroughly..."

Why is it that as we seek the best way to accomplish a task, we cling to the false belief that we are going to find one right answer? Personally, I love reading online and the fact that I can click on hyperlinks, bookmark key points/articles, and interact with others interested in the same topic/novel. Am I distracted or adding a level of interaction to this task that was not possible for previous generations of readers?  

Of course, the answer here is that sometimes I am distracted and less productive and other times I am able to utilize the online resources in a way that adds greater depth to my experience.  My main problem with the alarmists who would prefer that all students read paperbound texts is that they deny these students opportunities to experience the power of Interactive reading, as well as the chance to find their own individual sense of balance in this area.  We need to embrace the struggle that is part of this and have meaningful conversations to guide our own learning and the learning of our children.

Denying these opportunities benefits no one!