We received the following letter from Bill McBride the other day and wish to share it with you.

——

Dr. Robert Kenny
Department of Digital Media
Dr. Glenda Gunter
Dept. of Educational Research, Technology, and Leadership
University of Central Florida

Dear Robert and Glenda:

I am writing to applaud you for your ingenious work with your “Digital Book Talks.” As a former textbook Language Arts editor and author and National Consultant for McDougal Littell/Houghton Mifflin for 15 years, I have struggled to help teachers combine print and visual literacy. In my present position as an independent reading consultant who trains teachers world-wide, I am daily faced with audiences representing both “digital immigrants,” as baby-boomer teachers, and “digital natives,” as teachers under thirty (Marc Prensky, 2006). Much of the educational technology created so far has been simply a transfer of the same content taught for years onto a computer platform. Teachers who use the highly-touted “Smart Boards” often take the same content taught for decades and present it in a flashy computer-style medium.

The genius with the Digital Book Talks is that you have hit on using digital media/technology as a means to an end. By using our students’ natural desire and experience with computers as an enticement to read, you are creating readers. In 20 years of training teachers, I have never seen anything that I present that so excites my audiences. Older teachers understand and love the medium of a “movie trailer” even though they don’t understand Windows Media Maker or Apple iMovie. And younger teachers want to go home and instantly make their own. I now receive more requests for your web site at UCF for student samples than anything I’ve ever shown my audiences.

I can’t thank you enough for creating a strategy that actually moves our profession forward by wedding the visual, mediated world of the young with the wonder still found in a printed book.

Sincerely,
William McBride, Ph.D.
www.entertaininganelephant.com

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