Attached to Books, Bound by Technology

Week #3: Literature Review 

Is there anything better than cracking open an old book—one that has been loved by so many people it’s hanging onto its faded spine by a ligament of thread—and breathing in the vanilla-scent of the aging pages? To me, there’s nothing better. The tactile experience of holding a book and turning the yellowed pages is something I’ve found can’t be replaced.

Except in today’s world, it needs to be. The books I’ve come to love have been replaced with much more efficient e-readers and tablets. The slight swishing sound of pages turning has been replaced with the clicks of a keyboard, or the non-sound of a tap on a touch screen. The worst part is that instead of hating it like I thought I would, I absolutely love the new technology. I know, I know, I’m a hypocrite! I have a Kindle and I’m obsessed with it.

Best friends!

In my classroom, however, these new technologies seem to take a backseat to more antiquated methods. We don’t allow our students to use their e-readers for books we read in class. Instead, we force them to buy paperback copies. This has been a topic of much debate within our department. Most of us are pushing for hard copies of books as opposed to Kindle versions because it keeps consistency within the classroom: something that’s incredibly important for middle school kids, but hard to maintain. It’s also very difficult to control what they’re doing when you can’t see the screen. Multiply that by thirty, and I’d potentially have an entire classroom of eighth graders playing Angry Birds instead of reading Beowulf.

"We're Beowulf's thanes! We swear!"

But does that mean it’s not worth it? According to Naomi S. Baron’s study, “Redefining Reading: The Impact of Digital Communication Media”, e-readers and tablets are great for recreational reading, but not so great when it comes to deep reading. The study cites “difficulties in annotation, a reader’s tendency not to reread or remember digital text (compared with hard copy), and the overwhelming likelihood that people reading on digital devices will be multitasking, thereby dividing their attention” as reasons to steer clear of e-readers and tablets in a classroom setting (Baron 199). These are all outcomes that upset me as an English teacher. I spend so much time in my classroom emphasizing the importance of annotations and rereading; apparently, embracing this particular technology would diminish all of that.

This has given me quite a lot to think about as an educator who is struggling to find ways to incorporate technology in a basically tech-barren school setting. My school doesn’t even have a computer lab available to students during all class periods, despite being named #22 out of the top 500 STEM schools in the country. What happened to the “technology” aspect of STEM? Where do I go from here?

I found an article that put this into perspective for me. It reminded me that teaching isn’t about finding excuses to not do something, it’s about finding new ways to do everything. If every teacher in history let excuses hinder their teaching, we’d all still be writing papers on rolled scrolls using quills made from seagull feathers. In the article, Richard Jester—a sixth grade English teacher from Texas—discusses the development of students’ writing and analytical skills through multimedia presentations. In the history of forever, students have been learning how to write based on a very limited set of skills: put paper to pen, fingers to the keyboard, write a thesis statement, and go from there. Five paragraph essays for everyone! Excuse me a moment while I inwardly cringe. Although teaching kids how to write something rote is a useful skill, it doesn’t necessarily come easily to them. These are kids who have grown up in the age of infographics and smart phones. They’re not used to reading large blocks of texts, let alone writing them. So why don’t we just feed into this as a way to reach a wider variety of students? Jester answers this question with a resounded “yes!” and offers a unique project that I could easily see transferring into a more formal paper: a book analysis through PowerPoint.

Jester first suggests that the division of the slides helps students organize their ideas. In thinking of my students, who are not leveled by ability, I could see this being incredibly useful. The natural separation of ideas into slides would help even the lowest level kids organize their thoughts. It’s almost like a giant, interactive graphic organizer. Jester further says that “the ‘concreteness’ of the division provided by the slides helps students to visualize how their ideas must develop” (86). This is something I see a lot of students struggle with on a day to day basis in their writing. Ideas develop slowly and in steps; separating them into a PowerPoint—which is so easily “malleable for revision and editing” (86)—helps students figure out that flow without the permanency or anxiety of pen and paper or the giant-block-of-text in word processors.

Did a cat step on this person's keyboard?

Another point I found particularly compelling was the graphic and visual nature of presentation software. Jester states: “using multimedia will allow students to differentiate between important words and ideas through the use of color, text size and font, and position on the page” (87). Giving them the license to play around with different visual aspects of the presentation is such an important skill to have in our technological world. Almost everything they experience outside of school is visual: television, the internet, graphic novels, magazines. The list goes on and on. Here’s a project that not only hits all the major points of an analytical essay—for sixth graders! How awesome is that?—but it also plays into adolescents’ interest in media and technology. To put it in Jester’s words, it really “raise[s] words off the black-and-white page and brings them to life” (88), and as English teachers, isn’t that what we’re all trying to do? Bring words to life?

At the end of the day, there's so much technology can do for us if we just think outside the box a little bit, even if that means letting go of all those bookshelves filled with old novels. That being said, there’s good news for people like me (people who love the smell and feel of books, but are also a little attached to the new gadgets): Amazon now sells a perfume that smells like freshly printed books! The internet is such a wonderful place.

Resources

Baron, Naomi S. "Redefining Reading: The Impact of Digital Communication Media." PMLA. 128.1 (2013): 193-200. Web. 16 Jan. 2014.

Jester, Richard. "If I Had a Hammer: Technology in the Language Arts Classroom." English Journal. 91.4 (2002): 85-88. Web. 16 Jan. 2014.