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Education is one of the most central and important pillars in the life of any human being. Indeed, through proper education we achieve further progress not only for the individuals that make up a society but also of the society itself as a whole.
With a better education, you can achieve the personal, professional and economic growth necessary for the development of a city, a country, or a nation and to nurture social capital in general. Therefore, equality of access to education is one of the biggest concerns in the sector. In this digital era which is evolving around us, educational technologies can be put at the service of this cause, as long as they offer relevant functionalities and are properly implemented.
As previously mentioned, reading is key in learning, since it constitutes one of the basic mechanisms for transmitting information and knowledge. In fact, much of student success throughout the school year depends on reading skills and these must be practiced continuously and with proper follow-up to yield the best results.
The challenge of implementing a school library
In this framework, the advances that technology allows can be a great help. Before the digital era, implementing reading activities could be challenging for a school. Indeed, it requires not only the purchase of different educational materials (books, magazines, encyclopedias, etc.) but it is also necessary to have personnel in charge of its management, enough copies for each student, storage space, etc. In a certain way, an educational library in its traditional use does not allow much room to maneuver in terms of content rotation, diversification and updating of the offer. Who doesn’t remember their school library as a bit of an anachronism, with old air and books that seemed to have been sleeping there for more than 2 decades?
On the other hand, if the resources are not entirely provided by the school, it can lead to inequality between students, since not all families have the necessary budget to acquire titles on a regular basis. Also, as we have mentioned, to produce all its beneficial effects, reading is an exercise that requires follow-up, support and guidance, which not all parents are qualified or able to give. In this type of situation, students who don’t have enough support at home may be disadvantaged and fall behind in the learning process compared to their peers.
Why choose a digital literacy tool?
For this reason, the influence of the digital era in education is key, since it allows us to respond to some of these challenges. With appropriate educational technology, you can help improve reading habits, literacy, reading comprehension, and more. One of the digital alternatives that make these changes possible are digital literacy tools.
Indeed, these tools allow you to:
- centralize thousands of titles from different topics, authors and genres all in one place for a competitive price and without the need to expand your storage area.
- adapt reading activities to a more techy use, giving them a new feel, through which young generations at home in the digital world can feel more at ease with intuitive platforms, with a user-friendly interface and general operation to which they are accustomed in their day to day. This allows you to give a more attractive look to literacy activities, promoting reading habits that will last over time, benefiting the entire educational process.
- keep the catalogue of titles up-to-date, adapt it to different contexts, review or change it according to the approaches of the school year, build your own list according to the educational program but also according to the values and interests of the school
- use the functionalities in offline mode, allowing equal access to its contents for families with limited access to the internet.
- offer each student in the school program the possibility of consulting diversified content (books, ebooks, audiobooks, videos, podcasts, magazines, etc.) preventing these activities from entering into individual expenses at the discretion of each family and allowing more equality of access to said resources
- empower parents and engage them in their children’s literacy activities, with pre-established, personalized learning programs but also with follow-up data to help them assess their kids’ educational progress.
If traditionally for students, reading could be associated with adjectives such as “boring” or “uninteresting” and reading habits used to be cultivated in certain privileged circles, nowadays the use of digital educational tools gives a new image to reading, more attractive to digitally connected kids but also easier to manage for schools, teachers and families, allowing a more democratic form of access to education.