Our Fourth Grade Teacher is having her students work on a Life Science unit encompassing research skills, reading informational texts and writing about the material. They are working in groups on this project to find facts, vocabulary, and organize the information they learn. When talking to the teacher about the unit, she mentioned one thing she wants her students to take away from this unit is HOW to read online and to recognize that it is different from reading a printed book. This is was an interesting comment to me and one that I had thought about before. It is a topic that I discussed in my Master's Class "Using the Internet in Education" at New Jersey City University. We read an article by Nicholas Carr "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" (Atlantic Monthly July/August 2008, http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200807/google). In it, Mr. Carr quotes Maryanne Wolf, a developmental psychologist at Tufts University and the author of Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain, “We are not only what we read, we are how we read.” Wolf explains that by reading online, we develop a weak capacity for deep reading, often decoding information but become disengaged from interpreting text and reaching connections. Reading online often lends itself to scanning rather than actual reading and we can get distracted from the original topic with following hyperlinks in an article. When I read Carr's article and Wolf's concerns with reading online, I absolutely agree with both that the way we read and process online is different than how we read printed material. I do find that I read and comprehend differently with online material than with printed material. I have also seen my daughter have difficulty finding information in her online Science textbook but can easily find it in the printed textbook. When she first started using the textbook online, she was quick to swipe through the pages and scan, often moving too fast to realize what she was actually looking at and reading. I had to slow her down and teach her HOW to read her textbook online, showing her the similarities in the layout of the printed and online version as well as the differences. Once she understood HOW to use the online textbook, she was easily able to find what she needed. Now, she always uses the online version instead of carrying home the heavy textbook. While using the online version of a textbook is a great tool for students, they NEED to be taught HOW to use them to avoid frustration and to find right information.
With technology being such a large part of our society today, I was glad that our Fourth Grade Teacher was recognizing the importance of teaching her students HOW to read online and to recognize that there is a difference in the way they find and comprehend information. This is a skill they will use throughout the rest of their school career and the more practice they get with improving their comprehension and research skills, the more prepared and successful they will be. In a previous blog, I wrote about our kids brains being wired differently today than they were years ago (Are Kids Brains Wired Differently, 9/27/2013). Because of the digital world we live in today, the way we educate our students needs to change. We need to recognize the differences in the way kids learn and comprehend today compared with traditional methods, and we need to give them the tools they need to succeed in this digital age.
With technology being such a large part of our society today, I was glad that our Fourth Grade Teacher was recognizing the importance of teaching her students HOW to read online and to recognize that there is a difference in the way they find and comprehend information. This is a skill they will use throughout the rest of their school career and the more practice they get with improving their comprehension and research skills, the more prepared and successful they will be. In a previous blog, I wrote about our kids brains being wired differently today than they were years ago (Are Kids Brains Wired Differently, 9/27/2013). Because of the digital world we live in today, the way we educate our students needs to change. We need to recognize the differences in the way kids learn and comprehend today compared with traditional methods, and we need to give them the tools they need to succeed in this digital age.