Chapter 1: Learning, Teaching, and Technology

At CAST (Center for Applied Special Technology), a four-year-old girl sits at a computer with her mother, exploring Just Grandma and Me, an electronic storybook. When she clicks on a word, the computer says it aloud. The child repeats the word. Sometimes she says the word along with the computer, not after. After clicking through the text one word at a time, she says the whole sentence aloud, turns to her mother, and exclaims, "I can read!"

At the Harvard Literacy Lab, students with reading and writing difficulties willingly compose autobiographies, stories, and poems for personal home pages posted on the Lab's Web site. When e-mail responses to their writing arrive from other parts of the country and from as far away as Japan and Australia, they proudly mark the location of the sender on a map of the world.

These two examples illustrate how computers are changing the way children are learning to read and write. Some educators find these anecdotes exciting. They show the potential of new technology to revitalize reading instruction and to make reading more relevant to the lives of children growing up in the electronic age. Other educators find these anecdotes troubling. The first anecdote sounds more like "word-calling" than reading, and the second seems almost "anti-literacy" -- one more example of the erosion of traditional literacy in our culture.

For the majority of reading teachers, we suspect, these anecdotes raise important questions about priorities and resources. Given the limited time available in the classroom for teaching reading, how valuable are computer-based activities compared with other learning activities? Given limited computer resources, are these the most effective ways to use technology?

We believe computers can play an important role in literacy development, but considerable care must be taken to identify what that role is. Not all literacy software nor all strategies for using the computer to teach reading are valuable enough to consume limited time and technology resources.

Although we cannot resolve all of these concerns, we can begin to address them by examining computer technology in the context of new research on reading and learning. Bringing these two kinds of understanding together -- considering first how reading and learning actually happen and then what computers can do -- provides a solid foundation for determining how technology can effectively contribute to the processes of learning to read and write. Although we use specific literacy applications as examples, we have chosen not to provide a guide to good and bad software currently on the market. The roster of software changes so rapidly that such a guide would immediately be outdated. Instead we provide guidelines for evaluating technology products and teaching strategies -- guidelines that should remain current despite technological change.

Posting this book on-line in a digital format increases accessibility for readers with a variety of individual needs and purposes. For example, anyone can search the text, customize its appearance, or have it read aloud. Images can be turned on or off, accessed through image descriptions, or customized in appearance. Availability on the Web also provides direct access to Web sites mentioned in the book. Additionally, images on-line can be presented in color whereas the book's printed images are grayscale only.