Whip Me, Beat Me, Make Me Use a Computer to Improve My Reading

With federal reading improvement dollars flowing into some of our Title One schools, there’s been an increase in the use of computerized reading programs. Our district uses Read Naturally. Its website claims: Read Naturally continues to provide teachers with all of the tools they need to address the fluency needs of their students.

I sincerely hope not.

Granted, I am not a struggling reader or an ESL student. But I practiced with this computer-based reading tutorial last week. It had been a while since I had used such a creature and was expecting some dramatic improvements in machine-based reading instruction from what I had experienced four or five years ago. I was set up as a 5th grade, high-achieving student, and worked on a lesson about Daniel Boone – one of my favorite historical characters. The program made me review vocabulary, read the very dull story about three times, have the very dull story read to me three times (couldn’t skip), and gave me a low level quiz on my comprehension. I did a small amount of writing to summarize the content. I spent about an hour on a single passage of about 500 words. Boring, boring, boring.

You want to kill a kid’s love of reading quicker than Dan’l could kill a b’ar, this is the product to use. I ruefully reflected on how much better giving a kid James Daugherty’s fine book Daniel Boone would be and sit with him and read along.

I suppose in their place - in schools with sub par teachers, and with a very select number of students - programs like Read Naturally may do some good. But for the vast majority of kids, using these expensive basal-readers-on-a-disk run the real chance of creating negative associations with both reading and computer use.

All media specialists should be promoting another means of building student reading skills – Personal Voluntary Reading. It’s effective and builds not just reading skills, but the desire to read. Please purchase, read and share Stephen Krashen’s book The Power of Reading with your teachers and reading specialists. My review.

To me it seems the logical sequence in working with kids and reading is to instill the desire to read long before trying to teach reading skills. Good stories, good storytellers, and lots of exposure to books will do this; computers don’t.

Your experiences with online reading systems?

Digital Cameras and Visual Literacy

My father-in-law, Barney, has a new toy - a Canon Rebel SLR Digital Camera. He couldn’t have been more pleased by the shade of green I turned with envy when he showed it to me.

I’ve loved taking pictures since my baby brother was born. At age nine, my camera was a Brownie, if I remember correctly. I still have some of those affectionately taken 2×3 snaps around somewhere. I graduated to an Instamatic (remember flashcubes?), to a Polaroid, to a used Pentax SLR in grad school, to a new Pentax and big zoom lens that I used to shoot Kodachrome slides while on vacations.

But there was no looking back when I used the first QuickTake digital camera we purchased for the district. Wow. The pure luxury of shooting dozens of photos and tossing 98% of them without additional cost was intoxicating. iPhoto and Adobe Elements were a huge bonus - quick reliable photo editing. And more recently, the ease of using photo sharing sites like smugmug and give friends and relatives the ability to see and download photos as well. (On a recent bicycle tour in France, many of us riders swapped sharing sites.)

Digital photography seems to be one of the first and most simple technologies adopted willingly by classroom teachers. Simple cameras, simple editing software and cheap color printers have allowed teachers to create personalized booklets, posters, timelines, and bulletin boards, often with pictures taken by the students themselves. Powerpoint presentations with photographs help reach those visual learners.

I like the ways our clever T-Ls in the district use digital photography as well:
- to illustrate presentations to the school board, PTOs, and community groups with pictures of happy, productive, library-using kids (HPLUKs)
- to illustrate their parent newsletters with pictures of HPLUKs
- to promote reading by creating personalized “READ” posters of both kids and the role model adults in the buildings hold favorite reads

I am concerned whether we are doing enough to teach some basic principles of visual literacy - or at least, what are the qualities that make a photograph a good photograph. Like teaching a word processing program and ignoring good composition and editing skills, are we asking kids to take pictures, but not showing them how to compose and edit the images they create?

When we think about “integrating technology into the curriculum,” I hope we remember that digital photography is a simple and effective way to do this.

What are some ways you’ve seen digital photography being used productively in schools?

Problems first, tech second

Last week a high wind tipped over my dock that extended some 60 feet into the lake. (This will have a point about educational technology eventually.) I worried about how to get the heavy monster righted and repositioned for several days.

After discarding fantasies of construction strength helicopters, righting it turned out to be fairly simple. My son-in-law (who is about the greatest person I know), my lovely wife, and I loosened four bolts which separated the dock into to two fairly manageable sections, applied some muscle to flip each section right side up, and then used my pick-up truck and a borrowed log chain to move one section to the lawn for repair work, and the other into position on the shore. It took us about 2 hours, including the trip to the big town of Cleveland, MN, (is there another one?) to get the log chain.

While the tools we used weren’t “educational technology,” they were tools none the less - the wrenches, the truck, and even the manly/womanly muscles. And we used them to address a genuine problem - an unusable dock. In other words, the problem came first, THEN the application of technology.

When things go wrong with educational technology applications in schools, I find that it is usually because we start with the technology and then run around looking for a problem to solve. (Got any unused PDAs sitting in teacher desks in your district?)

The other thing I was reminded of was just how much darned fun problem-solving can be. Sure, I stewed about the situation for a couple days, but when we got right to the task, we enjoyed the tricky project. How dull life would be without problems to solve!

Any problems in your school or library at the application of technology might help with?