Chapter 12: The World of Online Children's Literature

This chapter discusses how children today are digital natives. 93% of children ages 8-18 spend an average of 90 minutes a day use a computer at home. Research shows that nearly 75% of this time is spent social networking, watching videos, and playing computer games. Most very young students even come into school having experience with digital gadgets. Statistics show however, a great majority of students are not using digital gadgets to go beyond what they learn in school. This is a teachers goal to teach students how to appropriately use digital texts and engage, motivate, and extend children's understanding with children's literature.
Digital texts open up ways children can be engaged in reading. Digital texts offer children to be able to change the size and or color of the text along with decide if they want to listen to the book rather than read it. Digital texts support a great way for readers to access a variety of learning supports, like prompts to stop and summarize, predict, visualize, and question the text helping students gain meaning. Digital texts also may cause controversy when students are searching the internet for accurate information. It is important that the teachers show students how to determine if information on the internet is accurate and unbiased.