Once again, for this #TDWednesday, we are taking a privileged peek at the forthcoming Teaching and Developing Reading Skills by Dr. Peter Watkins. This week, Peter has selected a digital reading activity from the chapter Exploiting Digital Resources.
Nowadays, it’s very common for us to engage with a huge variety of texts in a digital format as well as in print and using a variety of different devices such as tablets, smartphones, e-readers, etc. But is ‘digital reading’ really the same as reading a print text? Do we use the same kinds of skills? Do we comprehend the texts in the same way?
In the introduction to the chapter, Peter considers research findings on the comprehension of print and digital texts, the different types of digital reading which we might do and also the additional skills which might be required for digital reading. In the activity below, he offers a very simple but effective way to help learners reflect on how print reading differs from digital reading – something which many of us may not have really considered before. Why don’t you try it out yourself before trying it with your students? Do you notice any differences between reading from a print page and a digital screen? We suspect you might notice more differences than you first thought!