Topic Inquiry Blog Post 1 – Reading Cultures and ICT: Connecting Topic Inquiry with Cultural Considerations for Fostering Reading Cultures
With books going online and becoming electronic, I am a big believer in them. I feel that many children often do not either have access to books or know what to read. In addition, many children are constantly online or on mobile devices and there should be another option besides music, movies, TV, or games to entertain yourself with.
There has been a growing number of sites offering eBooks and reading online over the last eight years. I was one of the first people to get an Amazon Kindle, and the market was just starting for eBooks online and reading online. After Amazon took the lead on eReaders, the other big names in books such as Chapters (Kobo), Barnes & Noble, and Sony all came out with an electronic reading device. About two years after the first iPad came out, and the prices of eReaders dropped by half in order to complete with the Apple giant. This was great for many avid readers as the competition drove prices of the eReaders and eBooks down and the special features of them started going up! Now we started to see even more eBooks in multiple languages for both reading online or to download onto your personal reading device.
Being an English teacher who was working overseas and in hardship postings books was hard to come by, especially English books. Often I read the first twenty minutes of each school library book and then I would pass it onto the students. There were few websites to foster a reading community other than the online reading websites. There was not a lot in terms of social media besides “liking” a famous book or author on Facebook. This was not really fostering a community of readers. Teachers had little resources and most ICT was done at home not at school. I was fortunate that the majority of students came from pro-education and pro-reading families, and it was a struggle to help fill this need. The eReaders were a great resource and with the iPads coming out, people now had choices to make about how they wanted to read, wand on what type of device, or stick to the original paper novels. This was a great step towards international access to reading materials! At this point people were now able to share websites that they had found for both reading online and downloading individual novels. There was a great amount o sharing of books, and even more copyright infringement I am sure!
When I arrive din Singapore I was feeling the pressure to be as paperless as possible, and I was down to my “library logs” or weekly reading assignments. I had paper handouts that required signatures and it did take time to train the students on how to answer the questions, get the paper signed by a parent or guardian, and to return the log every week. By October I was under extreme duress to get onto “good reads” which was something I knew nothing about, and neither did my students. Once I got online and got the students competent in basic skills, we all went online together! The homework did not change, but the culture reading did! It as amazing to see how the students often forgot to do their logs on time, yet they were on the website playing the giving, making lists, reviewing books, and finding “friends” from the other classes on the website! I was able to give the students different and more creative questions to answer and post under our group discussion forum. I was able to send the students to the authors’ websites to find more books written by them. Students sent me quizzes to see who could get a better score. I recommended books to them and vice versa. Students could have their say about a book, and coommnet on eachothers ideas and throughts, taking their reading comprehensions to another level. At the end of the year, I feel that I did achieve a culture of reading and a stronger group of readers (and therefore writiers) beciause of this online book scoail media site.
There are so mnay new websites for reading online or downloading free eBooks (copyright varying) that I feel that there is a new kind of culture of reading online. With access to books in many languages, I feel that the skill and hobby of reading will not fade into the past, but continue to move and change into the future made possible by the ICT aavaiable to society.
I couldn’t agree more! If people are going to complain about the amount of screen time their children are exposed to, they need to be examining the conditions of their children’s lives that lead them to gravitate to a screen. At the same time, the attention we give the content on our screens could be greatly improved, including developing habits of learning from the information we find online. Kids could be using their screen time to improve their knowledge about topics, or producing their own content rich publications online. How interesting that the culture of reading changed with the format change. Also, access to hard copy books in some regions of the world would be very challenging, whereas access to digital books online, even via cellular networks, would be much more accessable.