E-BOOKS

In the article E-Books and TPACK: What Teachers Need to Know, the authors provide us with the following information:

“E- books offer an engaging medium for young struggling readers, ease of implementation for classroom teachers, and opportunities for individual practice for all students”.

Reading and writing can be difficult skills to teach at school. Working with e-books, however, can help teachers make this process fun and more motivating for students. One advantage of e-books is that they don’t only include text and pictures like traditional paper books do, but they also have interactive features that are more appealing to school-age children and that can encourage them to read, regardless the grade they are at. In the next quote from the article E-Books and TPACK: What Teachers Need to Know, they explain what kind of elements an e-book can contain:

“A deeper look at children’s e-books reveals a more complex form, a type of software that includes animations, sounds, videos, and a read-aloud function. The addition of electronics impacts the reading in new ways.”

The variety of elements included in e-books would also be useful for students with different learning styles; some of them will prefer the videos in these books and others might enjoy the pictures and texts. As for writing, the fact that students know that there is an audience beyond the classroom who they are writing for can also encourage them to do a better job.

After listening to Mr. Jon Smith’s presentation and reading about his work, I agree when he says that kids need to know that they can share their work with everyone, not only the teacher, and that they can contribute to the digital society with their work. In the article Using Book Creator to support students with autism, Mr. Jon Smith explains the importance of using e-books in the classroom and how beneficial it was for his students to use apps and design e-books to show their knowledge: 

“The students couldn’t stop writing and wanted to make more and more books.  They had so much fun and learned so much while using this app (Book Creator) that they have started a series of social skills books”. 

“I think students need to contribute more in the classroom. They need to be creating content and be a part of the learning process. They need to show us what they know and they need to be able to explain it”. 

In my classroom, I think it would be a great idea to work on writing and designing e-books. I think this would be a good way of assessing students’ progress, as it would give them more chances to show what they have learned in different ways. Children can be really good at writing or reading but most of the time they just lack motivation to do it. By giving them the chance to work on an interesting and challenging individual or group project, I think they would learn a lot.

In my opinion, teachers need to be trained in order to use apps to create e-book, so they can be able to teach this to their students too. It will be more challenging to work with e-books if we work in schools with fewer resources and not all students have access to an iPad or laptop, for example. However, as we heard in Mr. Jon Smith’s presentation, teachers can work with only one laptop or find a way to be able to make students participate in the creation of these e-books. The whole school support is also important, as well as getting parents participating in this process. I think including technology in the classroom can bring challenges for both teachers and students, and it can demand a lot of work at first. Although we might need to face these challenges, I think that with lots of practice, e-books can help us improve our students’ skills and exploit their talents.