The Joan Ganz Cooney Center, a leading organization studying the
ways in which 21st-century technology can help (and potentially
harm) early learning, recently released the findings of a study
on the divide between print books, ebooks, and "enhanced"
ebooks, their flashy, attention-grabbing counterparts. Ignoring
the misleading headline (the problem isn't whether or not
children benefit more from print books rather than ebooks) the
study is a great look at how we have to be careful when we add
glitz and glamor to the materials we use in pre-K and elementary
classrooms. To sum up the results, the ebooks containing
animations, video clips, sound, etc. were less beneficial to
adults and children reading together. As you can imagine,
reading these ebooks is fun and if your goal is to get a child
to become interested in the process of reading, they're great!
I've seen a few of the classic childrens books ported over to
iPads and other tablets and they look and sound awesome... in
many cases, they are the physical