Entering the World of Digital Reading

 I am thrilled to take part in a HUGE book study with #CyberPD this summer. The book we are exploring is called Digital Reading: What's Essential in Grades 3-8 William Bass and Franki Sibberson. I was thrilled when I discovered that this text was selected because it connects seamlessly to my role as a coach of digital age learning this coming fall. 

The first few pages paint a beautiful picture of what a digital reader looks like in 3rd grade. I love the idea of presenting the reading behaviors of Julia to my teachers and using her as our model until we are able to connect to our readers coming to us in August/September. What we all need to remember as we embark into the digital world is that our message to students is to hold on to their own reading goals and strive to meet them first. The devices are secondary. 

INTENTIONALITY

"How do we help teachers keep true to what we know about the best ways of teaching students to read and introduce digital reading into the mix?" (page  7)

I am so happy to see this question addressed early on in this book. The same question has been floating around in my head for the past year or so. I understand and believe that digital reading is not an add-on. We must intentionally plan our instruction to teach and foster the technology skills alongside our traditional reading lessons.

I just finished reading Troy Hick's Crafting Digital Writing. The word that stands out the most to me from that text and the beginning of this text is intentionality. We must be intentional in all that we do. As we roll out digital reading and writing, we must work the "digital" into our lesson plans and weave it into our traditional teaching.  As I look ahead at a unit of study, I need to look at the teaching points and decide how I will model the use of technology and rework them to incorporate digital reading/writing. If we are modeling our intentional decisions, students will become intentional in their everyday work.

NONLINEAR TEXTS and Traditional Reading Skills

This chart on page 10 is extremely helpful, however, it makes it very clear that there needs to be intentional instruction on how to navigate these types of text. I fear that some teachers may overlook the need of teaching students how to determine if a hyperlink is important or how to skip between various web pages while monitoring comprehension. As we begin this journey we will need to remind ourselves to slow down and incorporate mini-lessons on navigating nonlinear texts.

VARIETY

The first few chapters were a good reminder of the need for variety. We need to model our reading skills with a variety of text types. Paper copies of magazines are just as important as a link in Wonderopolis. We need to have a variety of ways for students to communicate with each other. Face-to-face is just as important as blogging. We need to model a variety of note-taking methods. Post-its and reading journals are just as important as Tweets and annotating digitally.

I look forward to the upcoming discussions about authenticity, connectedness, and intentionality.