This post originally appeared on Patrick’s Ed Week Blog
In many ways, today represents an unprecedented opportunity to advance student literacy. With tablets, e-readers, and mobile phones, you can literally carry endless shelves of excellent books in your pocket. In addition, education technology offers breakthrough tools to help teachers raise the literacy bar. Yet numerous factors hamper schools’ abilities to bring these benefits into our classrooms.
When it comes to purchasing and utilizing digital books, confusion reigns among educators. Lacking a good understanding of this fast-changing space, I see educators making short-term decisions about the transition to digital books and building ebook libraries without plans for instructional use. Perhaps worst of all, I see districts staying on the sidelines, delaying purchases of e-books because the options seem too murky to fully understand.
I believe we need to amplify the national conversation about this critical subject. As a district administrator, I want to highlight three under-recognized points: (1) the emergence of educational technology that can dramatically improve literacy…