Equipped with a basic understanding of technology, younger students can become reading masters and digital whizzes with the guidance of innovative teachers. This is especially true in today’s classroom, where the pandemic has accelerated our capabilities with technology at all ages. Larry Ferlazzo, an English and social studies teacher, affirms this new reality in a recent reflection on Google Docs. The shareable online documents allow Ferlazzo to “drop into” a student group’s work during class and help make writing, comprehension, and research better than it would have been otherwise. For older students with higher-level reading comprehension and writing skills, a basic technology such as Google Docs can be transformed into a collaborative, creative, and student-powered platform.

For both new readers and older students, educators and tech creators are increasingly aware of the potential of smartphone applications to augment literacy education. One of the newest literacy apps, WordSmart, taps into the human passion for stories and our aptitude for phonics to help students develop reading skills. WordSmart takes readers on an interactive adventure with the characters Tama and Tracey and tells stories about how different letters got their sounds (for example, ‘A’ is all about apples and ants). Then, readers play games where they have to match the shape of the letters to the corresponding sounds. This “gamification” of reading engages children in both the complexity and magic of reading, and the app also offers kids ways to promote self-control or manage their emotions through breathing, tracing exercises, and other mindfulness techniques. The app’s founder and former teacher, Paul Blackman, wants to offer a digital tool that is conscious of children’s diverse educational needs and socioeconomic backgrounds, and partnered with reading scientists from the Sweden-based Karolinska Institute to assess app users’ language fluency and modify their experiences of the app based on literacy levels.

From science-based apps to old-fashioned audiobooks, technology has much to offer to young readers, their educators, and their caregivers. With our newfound appreciation for in-person education, teachers can strategically implement technology into their literacy curricula to excite students, assist their caregivers, and nurture lifelong readers in a tech-based world.