Interactive Storybooks

This article presents how to create and how to use electronic books in the classroom. Electronic books are great resources for all students, especially students with reading difficulties and English Language Learners. These electronic books can easily be created in a program like Power Point. After reading a story, students retell the story and teachers put text, pictures, and animation on each slide. They then put a voice that reads the story on each slide as well. Students can play these books during reading time and it helps reinforce the story they read in their own words. They can track print, without having to turn pages, and receive additional scaffolding while reading the story.

This article helped me to make my interactive storybook for this class. I liked the suggestions it gave and the quick tutorial on how to create your own. I would like to learn more about actually recording my voice to read the story aloud. I do think that this article made it seem like creating these storybooks is less time consuming than it actually is. I spent quite a bit of time working with powerpoint, choosing the right graphics and animations to create my storybook. I would like to know more about how to adapt this practice to use with middle school students. I think it would be extremely time consuming to create these books for young adult novels. I think it would be fun though for middle school students to create these books for younger students in the school building! 

Citation for article used: Rhodes. J. & Milby, T. (2007). Teacher-Created Electronic books: Integrating Technology to Support Readers with Disabilities. The Reading Teacher,  61(3), 255-259. Retrieved July 14,2008, from Education Research Complete database.