Children’s reading with digital books: past moving quickly to the future

Digital books, such as e-books, story apps, picture book apps, and interactive stories, are narratives presented on touchscreens with multimedia and interactive features. Evidence suggests that early reading of print versus digital books is associated with different patterns of parent–child engagement and children’s outcomes. Parents’ verbal scaffolding, children’s age, and the congruence between a book’s narrative and its interactive and multimedia features are three documented process variables that explain the difference between reading print and digital books. To maximize the added value of digital books for children, we need to study the interaction among the characteristics of parents, children, and books; we also need to target these interactions through interventions and through collaborations between designers and researchers

Gamification of Authoring Interactive E-Books for Children: The Q-Tales Ecosystem

The e-book industry is reshaping the norm of traditional book publishing and most publishing houses are concentrating their efforts in digital, in order to satisfy new market needs and capture significant market share. Currently, one of out of five e-books sold, are children-related and overall, the e-book industry is projected to be valued at $18.9 billion by 2018. Nevertheless, the increased market penetration of independent writers accompanied with continuous technological improvements leads to new challenges for the stakeholders involved, as a growing number of individuals with limited resources attempt to compete against traditional publishing houses. The Q-Tales ecosystem aims to support the community of creative professionals, experts and parents co-create new (or transform existing) children literature into high quality interactive e-books. At this new disruptive approach of self-publishing, the gamification paradigm was employed, creating game-like experiences, to motivate professionals participate in the process and adopt it. The present study focuses on the gamification aspect of Q-Tales as means to drive engagement with the entire ecosystem and promote its appropriate use, enhancing the overall goal of creating interactive children e- books. The gamification design of the Q-Tales distributed system for collaborative authoring of interactive e-books for children is presented and discussed as a case study of gamification of electronic services. More specifically, game elements, such as points, leaderboards, badges, missions and feedback were infused in the architectural units of the platform, in correspondence to the overall development of the Q-Tales Gamification Framework

Children's agency and reading with story-apps: considerations of design, behavioural and social dimensions

A comprehensive understanding of children’s motivation to read e-books requires a multifaceted and contextualized conceptualization of children’s agency. In this study, agency was operationalized as a set of behaviour indicators of children’s control (behavioural agency), adults’ perceptions of reader identities afforded by the content and format of books (social agency), and specific multimedia and interactive features that afford personalisation (agentic design). In a comparative qualitative case study, seven preschool children and their mothers were observed reading four story-based interactive e-books (story-apps). Multimethod analysis that combined design evaluation with observational and interview data revealed behavioural agency was demonstrated in the children’s frequent, prolonged, and repetitive physical engagement with the story-apps. Social agency became foregrounded in relation to constitutive reader identities. Agentic design was related to children’s sense of autonomy. The findings have implications for how we theorize, operationalize, and apply the concept of agency in children’s e-books and reading for pleasure

Electronic books or print books for increased reading comprehension and vocabulary acquisition in third grade students

Can E-books contribute to increased vocabulary acquisition and reading comprehension in third grade students? Teachers face difficult decisions when determining whether or not to use interactive e-Books in the classroom. Studies (De Jong and Bus 2004; Jones and Brown 2011; Larson, 2009; Verhallen, Bus, and De Jong, 2006), have determined that the multimedia features of e-books have the potential of being beneficial to young children over traditional printed texts; however, studies have failed to prove that these additional text features increase reading achievement over traditional printed text. There has not been enough evidence to show that students reading achievement increases in the general education classroom when they read from interactive e-books rather than traditional printed texts. This study was conducted to determine the differences in third graders\u27 vocabulary acquisition and reading comprehension according to the medium of presentation. Two different story book formats were used, printed copies and electronic versions of the books. Twelve third graders participated in the study. All participants alternated between reading print versions of books and electronic versions using a balanced quasi-experimental design. When students read the electronic versions of the books, they had access to the multimedia features that the e-books provide, whereas the printed versions of the books had the support of the teacher when the students asked for help. After each participant read a book independently they answered ten multiple choice questions and one short answer. All test questions and short answer responses were completed on paper. The results of this study did not provide significant evidence that the additional text features of interactive eBooks increase reading achievement over traditional printed text

The Importance of a Good Home Literacy Environment

The ability to read is the most valuable and important skill for a child to acquire. A child who is an accomplished reader will be a good student and successful adult. Teachers spend countless hours teaching children to read, but without cooperation from parents or caregivers, children may still not become proficient readers. Practice reading needs to happen at school and in the home. Therefore, it is imperative that every child has a good home literacy environment. The purpose of this project was to develop a handbook for a child to take home to his parents or caregivers to convince them to provide a home literacy environment so the child will become a proficient reader and see it as an enjoyable activity. The child-friendly handbook was created in a coloring book style and was made to be an interactive tool between parents or caregivers and their children. It gives parents or caregivers ideas such as: (a) questions for parents or caregivers to ask as they read to the children; (b) places to read to their children; (c) places to have books; (d) different genres and types of books; (e) favorite picture books and novels; (e) where to get books; (f) local library locations; (g) educational websites and computer games; and (h) reading programs for extra help. In addition, the handbook has pictures for the children to color along with reading logs and activities

İnteraktif E-Kitapların Okul Öncesi Çocukların Öğrenme Becerilerine Yansımaları

The book has acquired the features it has today as a result of humankind's trial and error efforts to meet the requirements that arise over time. Many features that contribute to the book's reading, meaning and recall, such as color, font type, font size, images, decorations, page numbers, edge notes, and annexes, have gained value as factors that influence the book's selectivity over time. With the new millennium, new types of books have emerged in the digital world over time. In the past, e-books, which were digitized in the form of converting texts into non-dynamic reading forms, began to enrich with audio and video in addition to moving animations. In recent years, interactive e-books have been designed to include tests including reader testing, sharing options to create a social environment with readers, and rich digital object links integrated with the subject. It is also seen that interactive e-books developed to support the mental development of preschool children have been designed with a gamification strategy for teaching. In this context, the evaluation of the e-book that emerged with the new millennium until today is made; the contribution of this to the mental development of children, especially preschool children, is made determinations on both literature and observations. After evaluating the conditions and intensity of the interactive e-books in children's libraries in the world, the study of children's libraries in Turkey ends with recommendations to the services offered to childre

An interactive E-book with an educational game for children with developmental disorders: a pilot user study

Children diagnosed with Autism spectrum disorder (ASD), as one of the most complex neurodevelopmental disabilities, are characterized by different brain and functioning development, distinct interaction with the environment and different learning patterns, language and social skills impairments, and repetitive auto-stimulating restricting behaviors. It has been shown that computer-assisted intervention is much more attention captivating and interesting to children compared with a classic approach to teaching, allowing for faster acquisition of skills. This makes these tools and the technology highly suitable for teaching children with autism basic developmental skills. In addition, interactive electronic books showed positive outcomes for comprehension and information acquisition in children with ASD, while decreasing inappropriate children behavior in the classroom. In this paper a pilot user study on an e-book with an embedded educational game for children with developmental disorders was presented. The results show that the e-book can be efficiently used for teaching children with ASD basic developmental skills and that the learned skills can be efficiently transfered to new media and environments. The framework will provide preschool children with and without disabilities with appropriate educational software, to build up their early cognitive abilities and school readiness skills, and promote incorporating technology as part of the educational and pedagogical process in school

Critical Literacy and Read-Alouds for Social Justice Instruction in Primary Education

Paul, E. How can primary-elementary teachers use critical literacy and read alouds to teach social justice to young learners? (2020) Primary-aged children undergo extensive cognitive development. During these years, children’s estimation of self-worth and value goes under significant development and by age eight, children express whether or not they like themselves. As advocacy for social justice such as the Me Too and Black Lives Matter movements gain momentum, adults must determine how and when to have courageous conversations with children in which they support children’s pride in their own identities, disrupt pre-prejudices, and develop their skills to critically evaluate the world around them for justice. This capstone analyzes current literature surrounding critical literacy, read-alouds, and social justice through picture books to help answer the research question: How can primary-elementary teachers use critical literacy and read-alouds to teach social justice to young learners? The culminating project demonstrates how these elements can be used in a social studies curriculum for first grade learners. Final reflections upon major learnings, the literary analysis, and this project make evident the viability of critical literacy instruction via interactive read-alouds and social justice in picture books for primary aged children

Affordances and limitations of electronic storybooks for young children's emergent literacy

AbstractStories presented on phones, tablets and e-readers now offer an alternative to print books. The fundamental challenge has become to specify when and for whom the manner in which children retain information from stories has been changed by electronic storybooks, for better and for worse. We review the effects of digitized presentations of narratives that include oral text as well as multimedia information sources (e.g., animations and other visual and sound effects, background music, hotspots, games, dictionaries) on children's emergent literacy. Research on preschool and kindergarten children has revealed both positive and negative effects of electronic stories conditional upon whether materials are consistent with the way that the human information processing system works. Adding certain information to electronic storybooks can facilitate multimedia learning, especially in children at-risk for language or reading difficulty. Animated pictures, sometimes enriched with music and sound, that match the simultaneously presented story text, can help integrate nonverbal information and language and thus promote storage of those in memory. On the other hand, stories enhanced with hypermedia interactive features like games and “hotspots” may lead to poor performance on tests of vocabulary and story comprehension. Using those features necessitates task switching, and like multitasking in general, seems to cause cognitive overload. However, in accordance with differential susceptibility theory, well-designed technology-enhanced books may be particularly suited to improve learning conditions for vulnerable children and turn putative risk groups into successful learners. This new line of research may have far-reaching consequences for the use of technology-enhanced materials in education

A typographic case study: children's digital books in New Zealand primary schools

Increasingly children’s educational reading material is presented in a screen-based environment. This includes a range of interactive learning tools, interactive whiteboards, on-line standardized testing material, digital books including CD-ROMs and E-Books, as well as digital reference books such as encyclopedia and dictionary. With this increase in on-screen educational reading material and use of on-screen reading material in the school, it seems clear that the quality of material intended for children’s on-screen reading requires careful consideration to ensure that it is of a high standard and that it will facilitate children’s learning. This investigation case study’s digital books intended for learning through reading as found to be available to students of New Zealand Primary Schools. The writer analyses a selection of the products of the two publishers that were found available to primary and intermediate school children at two differentschoolsin two differentsocio-economic schoolregions. The writer outlines specific consideration of typographic presentation with respect to eye movements that will aid in the development of material for children’s on-screen learning including CD-ROM, E-Book, and web-based reading material