Reading Rainbow app
YouTube clips. Texting. Twitter. Facebook status updates.
The prevalence of short-attention-span media — easily scanned or consumed — has led to much hand-wringing over how students will develop that lifelong love of reading perceived to be so critical to lifelong learning.
One answer (in addition to “it’s not as bad as you think,” as a recent Pew Research Center study might be summarized) may be in adapting the function to the form. Which is to say to put real, and sometimes classic, children’s books on the latest digital devices via apps and the web.
That’s the tack several tech-oriented companies are taking with both fiction and non-fiction. And while the customer for each effort differs — ranging from parents to teachers to librarians — the emphasis is remarkably similar: instilling the love of reading and books early, even if there isn’t a physical book.
A handful of recent examples for this revenge of the retro:
LIVING BOOKS. Your first reaction may be that “Living Books” sounds familiar. And it should. A startup, Wanderful, is bringing back titles in the much-loved series that software company Broderbund originally produced two decades ago, at the dawn of the CD-ROM age.
No longer restricted to physical discs or desktop computers underpowered for multimedia, the updated titles are returning as $5 iPad iOS apps (and eligible for Apple’s Volume Purchase Program for Education), with plans to add Android versions after the first of the year. These newest Living Continue reading
