Why Little eLit?

Early Literacy and Electronic Literature for children

Why should we even consider eBooks for children? This is a hot topic right now, and while some forward-thinking and inherently awesome librarians (and other people) all all jiggy with eBooks for kids, others are not yet convinced. The plain and simple truth is that we live in a digital world, and if we want our kids to be successful in that world, they're going to have to be smart about technology. Let's give them good books, electronic AND tree-based, so that their little sponge brains can soak up all that good learnin.

eArticle Review: For Reading and Learning, Kids Prefer E-Books to Print Books

In a study of 24 families with children ranging from three to six years old, researchers from the Joan Ganz Cooney Center found that children prefer reading an e-book to a print book. Comprehension was the same with both, with the exception of enhanced e-books. Enhanced e-books with games and other interactive elements hindered comprehension of the story. The Joan Ganz Cooney Center plans larger studies on the issue. The article continues with a discussion of the children’s e-book and app market. Concerns are raised about a possible digital divide with disadvantaged children not having access to e-books. In conclusion, experts and publishers agree that getting a child interested in reading is the important thing, not the format of the book.

Posted by Leslie McNabb

App Review: First Words

Review submitted by the lovely Genesis.


Here's my tip for getting through a restaurant meal with a toddler: get the FirstWords apps from Learning Touch. We have both the Animals and the Vehicles apps ($1.99 each). They also offer a Deluxe edition for $4.99 that has animals, vehicles, colors, shapes, etc.

FirstWords shows a picture of an animal or vehicle, with letter tiles spelling out the name of the object. There are corresponding letter tiles scattered randomly below the image and the child has to move the letter tiles to their appropriate place by correctly matching tiles. Each time my son touches a letter tile, the app reads the letter. When he touches the picture, the app says the name of the object. Once he successfully puts all the letter tiles in their correct places, the app reads each letter, says the whole word, and the picture spins, enlarges and makes the appropriate animal or vehicle sound before moving to the next word. The voice of the male reader is clear and pleasant.

There are some settings you can adjust to make it a little easier or harder depending on your child's age and familiarity with the app. I love that there are visual cues for beginners who don't know their alphabet yet. They can randomly move tiles around, but when they get close to the matching tile, it lights up.

My son adores these apps and was very quickly able to use them without help from Mom. He learned his alphabet by playing these games, picked up some vocabulary and now he gets that letters combine to make words. It's really fun to see him take skills he's picked up using the iPhone and apply them to reading print books. He loves to spell out titles and words in his books, and it's very natural to him to move between print and electronic media.

FirstWords apps are currently available for iPhone and iPad, and I thought they were worth every penny. New animals and vehicles have been added at no extra charge with periodic updates of the app, which helps to keep the game interesting. For less than the price of a mocha at Starbucks my son has had hours of entertainment and education, and it's so nice when my husband and I can actually sit and enjoy a cup of coffee at the end of a meal instead of taking turns chasing our energetic boy around a restaurant. Also great for car trips, plane rides, doctor's waiting rooms, or anytime the parent in charge needs a little break.

Learning Touch also makes a First Letters and Phonics app. My son loves it, but to me the voice of the reader/singer for the app is only slightly less grating than nails on a chalkboard. Caveat emptor!

Libraries Get the Shaft in Otherwise Cool Book

I just started reading John Palfrey and Urs Gasser's Born Digital: Understanding the First Generation of Digital Natives (review to come).

It depresses me that I didn't have to read any further than page 2 to hear libraries being slammed:

[Digital natives] study, work, write and interact with each other in ways that are very different from the ways you did growing up.  They read blogs rather than newspapers. They often meet each other online before they meet in person. they probably don't even know what a library card looks like; and if they do, they've probably never used it.

DAMN!  OUCH!  BLARG!

That hits right where it hurts.  Granted, this book was written in 2008 (that's TOTALLY ancient), and I don't remember seeing either of the authors at CLA this year to see all the cool stuff lots of public libraries are doing for these digital natives.  We're working on it, guys!

I held regular teen craft nights in my branch where we made duct tape iPod protectors.  We're acquiring all sorts of eReaders in my current library to train the staff with so they know what to do when someone comes in and says "I can't get this eBook to work!" We're working on changing the minds of the more conservative librarians who think that all a library will ever need to provide for young people is books and storytimes.  We're facebooking, tweeting, blogging, chat referencing and tumblring.  We're LMFAOing.  We're pimping our iPhones right along with our bookcarts.

But we can't compete with Amazon, iTunes, Google, B&N, The Pirate Bay or all sorts of other providers of digital entertainment when it comes to ease and convenience.  Not yet.  We need some of those digital natives to infiltrate the publishers to make it a little easier to lend digital content.

UPDATE:

Page 8 says this:

Librarians, too, are reimagining their role: Instead of primarily organizing book titles in musty card catalogs and shelving the books in the stacks, they serve as guides to an increasingly variegated information environment.

Ok, they get points for the "increasingly variegated information environment" bit, but these dudes must be old.  Card catalogues?  Librarians shelving books? That's just crazy talk.