6 Ways Technology Can Help You Teach Reading More Effectively
When used well, tech tools can reveal where students are struggling, highlight their progress, and challenge and inspire them to improve.
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Go to My Saved Content.In the popular imagination, at least, technology is increasingly viewed as an enemy of reading. Tales of 140 character attention spans, dwindling comprehension, and loss of the ability to focus and think critically have become more and more common, with a recent story in The Atlantic pointing to a familiar culprit—the cell phone. Research appears to ground some of the fears in science: Several new studies suggest that comprehension takes a small hit, for example, when reading occurs on digital devices, instead of more traditional formats like paper books or magazines.
But other research points to benefits when digital tools like embedded dictionaries, shareable comments, or animated illustrations are available to readers. When used well, experienced educators say, technology can dramatically improve early reading instruction inside classrooms, revealing areas students struggle with, providing a tangible record of growth over time, or motivating students to continue taking steps forward. Over time, a smart mix of print-based and tech-powered options enable students to flex their literacy muscles, reflect on their progress with intention, and develop into more thoughtful, proficient, curious readers.
Record and review: When testing her third- and fourth-grade students on fluency, teacher Megan Ryder realized that while she could hear her students reading, they couldn’t hear themselves. To solve the problem, Ryder turned to the popular music creation app Garage Band, which allows students to record themselves—though any recording app, like Apple’s default Voice Memos, can work just as well. “We're going to record your voice,” she tells her students. “You can listen back to how you're doing. It's going to be really cool and then we can talk about how we can continue to make great growth.”
In small groups of four or five at a time, Ryder models the activity. The first time students record themselves is practice; students read a series of phrases aloud without recording, then press the red button when they’re ready. The next time, Ryder might highlight an area of focus, like reading accuracy. “You're going to do the same thing, then let's go through and see if we can find any words that maybe we made a mistake on,” she says. “Beforehand, I ask the kids if there are any words they noticed that are challenging that they want to go over before they record so that they're not super worried,” which she says can impact their reading performance.
As she listens back to the recording with the student one-on-one, she’ll ask questions like, “How was your reading pace?” or “Did you understand what you read?” Students tend to overestimate their mastery of certain concepts or ideas, and reading is no different. While providing feedback on areas where the student is doing well is key to motivation and engagement, the process must also be a vehicle for clarification: “Having them listen back is important. There have been many times when I gave them feedback and we didn't have an iPad where I said, ‘I'm noticing that we're having a hard time with this word.’ If a student says, ‘well, I said that correctly,’ and I know that they didn't, this serves as a nice little reality check.”
Turn the captions on: Subtitles and closed captioning can be your secret weapon for improving students’ reading skills, and your class will be none the wiser, writes Alise Crossland, a senior researcher at American Institutes for Research. A flick of a button transforms videos into an opportunity to hone and sharpen a number of crucial literacy skills like word recognition, decoding, reading speed, and fluency.
Struggling readers can benefit from both seeing and hearing words they’re unfamiliar with simultaneously, she says, while more reluctant readers who generally avoid reading activities “can add many hours of reading practice and literacy skill development.” While students must eventually graduate to book reading, ELLs can practice reading new words while seeing how they’re spelled on screen and connecting the sound and pronunciation of words with their written form in context.
When working with lower-level readers, videos aimed at their areas of interest or created for a younger audience work best, Crossland says, from an animated action film to an interview with their favorite celebrity. “Entertaining, brief videos tend to have less challenging vocabulary and your students will still receive the literacy benefits of reading while listening,” she says.
To extend the impact outside of her classroom and infuse more passive entertainment with a bit of hidden purpose, Gardner suggests that families turn closed captioning on at home while children are watching TV.
Help them see their growth: “Motivation is part of reading,” writes educator Jason DeHart, and so is “close and careful work on the mechanics of the process itself.” Creating digital video portfolios allows students to watch themselves grow as readers in real time, offering a motivational boost that keeps them plugging along while diligently developing their skills. Recorded audio lets students assess auditory aspects of reading like their tone, pace, or fluency. Video, on the other hand, provides the same opportunity with an added benefit for teachers, who can see things like a student’s eye movement, body language, or facial expressions as they track along with the text.
A single video can illuminate how emergent readers and writers are “connecting letters, sounds, concepts of print, and reading,” writes kindergarten teacher Kerstin M Schempp. A handful of videos are the initial brushstrokes in the larger picture of growth over time. Across the span of a school year, a student could look back and see their nervousness and trepidation with reading slowly fade away, replaced by growing confidence and composure.
Consider pairing this type of video creation with light reflection. Instructional coach Alissa Alteri Shea has early elementary students answer simple questions like “How are you feeling?” and “What was the most important thing you want to remember?” Their responses—Don’t give up… Try your best… You can do it…—painted on rocks with vibrant colors, could serve as powerful reminders on their continued journey with reading.
Provide reading ‘role models’: Just as mentor texts model what strong writing looks like, it’s often helpful for students to regularly hear a skilled reader—someone whose reading habits they can model. Audio-assisted reading provides them with just that: a recorded reading from a fluent reader students can listen to as they read along in their books. Generally used with a single student or in small groups, this tactic “helps to build fluency skills including proper phrasing and expression, helps students improve sight word recognition, build comprehension, and allows students to hear the tone and pace of a skillful reader,” write the authors at Reading Rockets, a national public media literacy initiative.
After selecting a reading passage that is slightly above a student’s independent reading level, students listen to the audio recording while following along with a paper copy. The next time, the student will read along with the audio, but out loud. The third time, they’ll turn off the audio and read the passage by themselves as many times as they need to until they feel comfortable and confident. Reading Rockets suggests Storynory, Lit2Go, or Learning Ally when looking for read-along options, though teachers can also create their own audio recordings for students to use.
Lean into accessibility features: Gardner had a goal when her school went one-to-one: She wanted to prevent the iPads all of her students received from becoming sit-and-get assessment tools. She aimed instead to use them in “creative and innovative ways to guide, model or prompt us into learning how to read and write.”
Accessibility features like Speak Selection—which reads any text available on the iPad out loud—has been especially beneficial for her classes of kindergarten and first graders, who are all ELLs.
Gardner creates digital poetry journals for her students to boost their vocabulary acquisition on a number of topics, for example she might gather a collection of poems about the holiday season. With Speak Selection, students can independently open the poetry journal on their iPads and have a poem read-aloud to them as many times as they like. After repeated listenings, students then record themselves reciting the poem. “We also talk about how if you're at home and maybe you don't have somebody there to help you when you're reading something on the iPad and don't know what it says—or if nobody at home speaks English—you can use this tool at home on your device to support you in practicing your reading skills,” she says.
Students can also use speech-to-text features like Dictation on the iPad or Voice Typing in Google Docs by themselves, create their own text—making up a short story or recounting a recent memory, for example—then record themselves reading it.
Get them writing to read: “Wordless videos” are a great way to get students both reading, writing, and retelling, Gardner says. These types of short animated clips require students to pay close attention as the story unfolds—inferring critical details about the narrative from the events that happen on the screen, the facial expressions and body language of characters, and even the background music.
To start, everyone watches a short clip together—like this Disney animated video about a long-eared mouse in a pet store or this classic Pixar short about a group of birds who encounter a stranger. Next, students write a brief description of what they think happened in the video. Gardner has a clear, established classroom routine to fall back on: Whenever students produce a writing sample, they know they’re going to be recording themselves reading it. So when they’re finished with their writing, students read the stories they’ve crafted into the recording app on their iPads, which Gardner reviews. Gardner has used a number of videos from The Literacy Shed including: