"R u really reading" response notes

Ariella Aghalarian

• Disabled students find it more comfortable to read and write online
• Some experts say that using web is still engaging students in the use of text and reading
• Some say that learning online reading skills will even help the children to learn to get jobs in the new digital age- making students read big books now is unrealistic- so they can get their reading from online
• Some even want TO TEST STUDENTS ON COMPUTER LITERACY
• Others argue that children don’t do much reading because they are spending most of their time doing things that involve minimal reading
• On the Internet, readers skate through cyberspace at will and, in effect, compose their own beginnings, middles and ends.
• Benefits of electronic media do not override the benefits of frequent reading (chairman of N.E.A)
• Children are clearly spending more time on the Internet. In a study of 2,032 representative 8- to 18-year-olds, the Kaiser Family Foundation found that nearly half used the Internet on a typical day in 2004, up from just under a quarter in 1999. The average time these children spent online on a typical day rose to one hour and 41 minutes in 2004, from 46 minutes in 1999.
• “Learning is not to be found on a printout,” David McCullough, the Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer, said in a commencement address at Boston College in May. “It’s not on call at the touch of the finger. Learning is acquired mainly from books, and most readily from great books.”
• Nadia’s mother says that even when they introduced their daughter to the site fanfiction.com and their daughter was reading, the reading had a lot of spelling and grammatical mistakes which could affect Nadia’s future spelling and correct grammar abilities
• “No ones ever said you should read more books to get into college”- Nadia
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• Nicholas Carr sounded a similar note in “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” in the current issue of the Atlantic magazine. Warning that the Web was changing the way he and others think, he suggested that the effects of Internet reading extended beyond the falling test scores of adolescence. “What the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation,” he wrote, confessing that he now found it difficult to read long books.
• One early study showed that giving home Internet access to low-income students appeared to improve standardized reading test scores and school grades. “These were kids who would typically not be reading in their free time,” said Linda A. Jackson, a psychology professor at Michigan State who led the research. “Once they’re on the Internet, they’re reading.”
• Student Zachary believes book are only one way→ agree
• The kinds of skills Zachary has developed — locating information quickly and accurately, corroborating findings on multiple sites — may seem obvious to heavy Web users. But the skills can be cognitively demanding.
• Interpreting videos or pictures can be just as important as analyzing a book or a poem
• “The internet gives you what you need. Nothing more and nothing less”
• Reading online meets the needs of someone who might not meet the need of a fluent reader
• Nadia made it through one chapter of a book she was not so into before she went back into online reading- because she felt more comfortable there.

• As teenagers’ scores on standardized reading tests have declined or stagnated, some argue that the hours spent prowling the Internet are the enemy of reading — diminishing literacy, wrecking attention spans and destroying a precious common culture that exists only through the reading of books.