How can digital library systems help teachers support-children's reading for pleasure

Kucirkova, Natalia and Cremin, Teresa (2017). How can digital library systems help teachers support-children's reading for pleasure. IOE London Blog, UCL, London.

URL: https://ioelondonblog.wordpress.com/2017/10/09/how...

Abstract

Children need to be able to read well to function in society and their engagement as readers needs nurturing from birth. Digital library systems offer enormous opportunities to tap into children’s interests and enhance teachers’ skills as literacy mentors.

They can help teachers and children find relevant content, archive readers’ responses to individual books and share them with others on a large scale. These systems can support reading for pleasure, acting as free book depositories (e.g., International Children’s Digital Library), providing tailored recommendations for new titles on a regular basis (e.g., Epic!) and offering children multimedia story experiences as in a virtual library (e.g., StoryPlace). Teachers’ resistance or openness to the sustained use of such technologies dictates their potential to make a difference to children’s learning.

In our new paper in the Cambridge Journal of Education we explore the pedagogy behind many popular digital library systems in schools and outline how they could position teachers as informed listeners, mentors and co-readers.