When I began to develop my topic, I wasn't focusing on the effects of e-Reading on reading comprehension, vocabulary, and overall learning experience in K-12 students. I didn't really know what I was going to focus on. I knew I wanted to find research that showed e-Reading could add to the already brimming list of distractions that the internet has brought to the relaying of information, because that's what I believed.
I have always been an avid reader, and I covet my ever-expanding shelf full of print books. I think when you purchase and own and take care of physical objects, you care about and appreciate them more - same goes with their content, I always thought. When e-Readers really began to get popular a few years ago, I thought, okay, so you can have thousands of books stored in one device - does that mean you really care about all of those books? Are you going to read much more because you have them? Are books going the way of music, movies, newspapers, magazines, etc?
The thought frightened me. I never gave the implications for education any thought until I narrowed down my topic. And the results initially startled me - e-Reading is being shown, in fact, to improve literacy rates, understanding of material, vocabulary-building, and the overall learning experience for students and educators alike.
With textbooks increasingly being standardized for electronic versions and children's books being specifically designed for electronic versions to include learning games, activities, videos, etc., there really is no limit to where these new tools are going to take the future of education.
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