Technolandy

Day 94 (of 2924/25) #tEChursday the depletion of online reading tools are why reading scores are dropping…

Not going to go deep into screen vs paper tablets. For me, if it has you reading text, it’s awesome. If you’re listening to a book… well – at least there are some similar skills going on in your brain 😜even if it’s not decoding alphabets… 

So, where to go to get started on some of the key basic building blocks:

Spelling – I LOVED using the game Fowl Words because of how it connected to the program of ‘building words’ rather than memorizing word lists… sight words are important, but memorizing some of the others out of context is tricky – I much preferred focusing on building understanding by looking for common spellings (-tion- words; sound blends; -ing/ed -> all the skills helping me on my morning NYT Spelling Bee… 7 hens lay 7 eggs with 7 letters and you try to figure out what the 7 letter word(s) is and what the ones of other lengths may be as well. But as a ‘flash’ game… it didn’t survive very well… 

I know Reading Eggs is popular, but my complaint continues to be that in western Canada at least, why are we getting a British accent to help decode letters and words? But actually, I prefer a more gamification version of the games of reading (to help with writing… with the reminder that most people write two years below their reading level <— to reinforce a possibly problematic ‘standard of achievement’) which leads me back to my game list that I often use (sadly most of my resource list either has aged out with code 404 or suffers from the ‘red screen of death due to violation – aka being too much of a game for our school internet rulers’. But check out:

• reading ‘millionaire’

And https://pbskids.org/games/reading

Hey, wait a minute… by the same use of research and data as some other book publications…(where correlation is more important than diving into causation; and not looking at other outside factors such as school violence and threats is just fine…. Sorry, my bias is showing!) 

I think I have solved the real reason for a drop in reading scores… those two links are the minimum… and scores were much higher when my virtual repository had a lot more:

LITERACY GAMES that mostly don’t work any more… 

1. 1. Fowl Words
2. 2.•spelling city (you provide words)
3. 3.•spelling online games
4. 4.•word safari
5. 5.•reading games
6. 6.•word sailing
7. 7.•crosswords
8. 8.•hangman
9. 9.•primary reading games
10. 10.•reading ‘millionaire’
11. 11.•word confusion
12. 12.•misc word games
13. 13.1.reading intervention resources (penningtonpublishing)

Is there any wonder why scores are dropping? The games to inspire reading (my era: speak and spell) are no longer as available and the new ones are not as… earthy as the old ones <— yes, I am mindful of the use of ‘earthy’ in a tech focused resource list… 

Learners need a variety of tools (not just one type) and readings (rich and diverse) to be available to them. Today my #literacyweek share to my online school community was about comic books (check my or my schools instagram) and I do admit that comics are format that I much prefer the paper tablets over the screen viewing experience. But I also have hundreds of titles for exploration… when teaching with the ‘bigger list’ we had a lot more available games to encourage reading skills… now most of them are blocked/ceased to function. Hmmm not everything gets better in the future…

I will commit to spend some time in a school wifi and do some more searching for no-login/subscription tools that will help students play with reading skills in techie ways to better enable them to transfer those skills from screen to paper… if you find any that work well – feel free to email them to me at ilandy@icloud.com