Interview with Andrea

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Milhouse Van Houten interviews Andrea Aguilar about her Reading with Technology blog.
http://aguilara5364.podOmatic.com/entry/2010-07-09T06_40_58-07_00

Teaching Reading with Technology

Reading is an essential communication tool that helps us get along in the world, in all aspects of our life, from reading small instructions or recipes, to understanding the news, and what is happening in the world around us, to researching doctorate degrees projects. People that do not read with certain skills tend to fall behind both in school and in the job market. Across the nation students who fail to master reading are isolated, fail to progress in other subjects, suffer with significant self-esteem issues, and are more likely to be drop-outs or even get in trouble with the law (Socol, 2005).

Teachers with 30 or 40 students in a classroom cannot make time to teach one on one those children that need it the most. A lot of times parents do not have the time or do not make an effort to read with their kids and talk about reading with them. All of these shortcomings produce children that lack mastery in reading and that keep falling behind more and more every year.

The use of technology increase "read-to" time, allow students to work with sophisticated or complicated stories holding their interest, and give students access to more information that can be of interest to them and part of their content areas. Technology helps students in all reading skills, from their ABCs to comprehension of long complicated stories or articles. The classroom computer, properly equipped can do the work of the teacher, and give children support without needing the teacher nearby (Socol, 2005). This gives children independence in their learning and boosts their self-esteem. They start defining their goals, making decisions and choices in their learning and evaluating their own progress.
There are many sites and programs available to use in the classroom or at home. everythingesl.com, for example, gives us a list of sites where students can find eBooks, fiction, and non-fiction stories, history lessons, vocabulary, phonemic awareness exercises, multicultural stories, comprehension quizzes, poems, songs, riddles, tongue twisters, to just name a few fun things. This site, although intended for English language learners, is perfect for any student, struggling reader or not. In fact, a lot of these sites on the list are not specifically for ELL students (Haynes, 1998). Some of the fun and educational sites listed in everythingesl.net are:

• Starfall.com: For grades 1 and 2. It has fiction and non-fiction, art, music, tongue twisters, bird riddles, and poetry. You can choose different levels from ABC to independent reading.
•Bookhive.com: In this site, famous storytellers tell different favorite stories.
• Tumblebooks.com: As in Bookhive, Tumblebooks has a wide range of books you can choose from and that are read to the student while he/she follows what’s been read in the virtual book (Haynes, 1998).

If you still want the student to read the actual book, Accelerated Reader has an enormous list of quizzes the student can answer after having read that particular book. This way, the student checks out the book from his/her school library, reads it, and go into Accelerated Reader to answer a quiz. Through the Accelerated Reader program, the teacher can access student’s statistics to monitor both the quantity and quality of reading practice engaged in by his/her students. After reading, the student goes to the computer and takes a multiple-choice comprehension test on the book's content. Tests may have 5, 10, or 20 items, depending on the length and difficulty of the book. The computer scores the test (International Reading Association, 1999).

These are just a few choices of computer-based reading instruction. There are so many others teachers can research and choose depending on their needs and the needs of the students. The good news is that there’s help for those struggling kids. You just have to “Google it”.
References
Haynes, J. (1998). Elementary websites for English language learners. Retrieved from
http://www.everythingesl.net/inservices/elementary_sites_ells_71638.php
International Reading Association, Inc. (1999). What is Accelerated Reader? Retrieved from
http://www.readingonline.org/critical/topping/rolarD.html
Socol, I. (2005). Literacy in the elementary classroom. A quick look at the possibilities. Retrieved from http://www.ldaofmichigan.org/articles/early_intervention.pdf

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