There is so much to say about the intersection between technology and literacy today. I’m actually considering devoting a day a week to this idea but for now I just want to sing the praises of the iPad. I have been using my iPad with a client for the past few weeks. He is a tough little guy to motivate so we have been doing a hands on activity followed by an iPad game to hold his attention. I was beginning to think of the iPad games as the fluff between the real instruction but today I stumbled upon an app that showed me what a true literacy tool the iPad can be.

Many parents have used  the BOB books with their children.

 They are one of the few phonetically controlled books available at the big chains like Barnes and Noble and Borders. In order to use these  books though, you need to have children who are not only happy to read phonetically controlled text but also happy to follow a story with no plot and black and white stick figure illustrations. So as a reading specialist I appreciate the BOB books for their phonetic content but as a parent, I have begun to detest these books as much as my girls did.

Now…enter BOB books for iPad. Children are exposed to phonetically controlled text. They are able to read sentences to themselves and also to highlight pictures and drag the correct letters to spell the word highlighted. Each time a letter is highlighted, it’s sound is read aloud. And the pictures are in color. And the characters can be manipulated and moved.

The iPad has brought the BOB books to life in a perfect intersection of the old and the new. As both a reading specialist and a mom, I couldn’t be happier.