How quickly modern internet tools and skills are adopted by elementary school kids always astonished me… I have seen this happen so often that I have no real reason to feel this way…but I always do…
A perspective on this experience is what this link relates to, along with a quite interesting idea. Many of these kids are internalizing the tools which we consider to be new and intimidating…to them everything is new, and no distinctions are being made about the actions of their teachers and parents regarding the ‘new online world’. Many elementary school kids see this world as a whole cloth…
Taking this idea into consideration, it may be quite probably that many of these kids are starting to see reading in some subtly different ways…
When I was that age, readers were the kids who took the time to use a dictionary (in order to amass a greater trove of words…often found in more challenging books…). Now, especially if you are reading using some sort of eReader…instantaneous (OK the Kindle isn’t THAT fast, nearly instantaneous may still fit the bill…) access to a dictionary or a Google search is implicit in using these reading ‘machines’.
My best guess is that this may become a sort of great equalizer for early readers, in that accessing new words in context in this manner allows more readers to progress further than many of them may have otherwise gone. For kids who are already enamored with reading, this might be a relatively innocuous aside, bit for the kids who don’t want to struggle…this may have some interesting long term effects…
Are Online Behaviors Affecting Reading Skills?
http://edte.ch/blog/2011/05/07/are-online-behaviours-affecting-reading-skills
In my final weeks of school our class had our usual Tuesday afternoon guided reading session, where we get the opportunity to work on some reading text with a small group of children. One particular comment from a pupil has stuck in my mind, so I thought I would share some of my reflections with you.
Whilst exploring a text we came across a particular word that became the focus of our attention. Although the group had no problem reading and pronouncing it they didn’t know what it meant. I aimed to set the children off exploring the definition from the information we could acquire from the sentence and the text overall, we may have even cracked open a dictionary or two…
“We could just Google it!”
As you can see the comment from one of the group stuck in my mind for a number of reasons. Firstly it indicated to me how much web searching had become part of how these 9 and 10 years olds process the information they see in the world.
