Digital Literacy Resources

            It is no surprise that we are living in a digital age, and it is important to expose students to printed and digital texts. The literacy world is ever growing with digital resources for readers, and the following are three websites that every reading teacher should keep in his/her reading toolbox.

International Children’s Digital Library

This website is an online library for children all over the world. The mission of this site is to promote diversity and acceptance by providing some of the best children’s literature in the world. Immediately upon connecting to the site, you can click on one of several links to browse the texts available. It is user friendly in that you can peruse titles by language, format, genre, characters, and more. Thousands of books are available to be read directly from the website, and that is highly appealing to students, and this is my favorite feature of the site. I can see this as a beneficial resource to connect to social studies standards, such as cultural celebrations, or used for reading lessons, like variations of favorite fairy tales. This is a valuable resource for teachers or parents to introduce students to a variety of worlds and cultures they might not otherwise ever visit. 

Epic

            The Epic online library is a resource I have used in my classrooms for many years. Students thoroughly enjoy this website and have referred to it as “Netflix for books.” Students can have individual log-ins to the site and browse and favorite their own books; however, without a parent paid subscription, the student free version deactivates at 3:00 pm each day. The site is engaging, and students quickly learn how to navigate its uses. One of my favorite features from Epic is the broad range of genres and topics in the system. Students can search titles from life cycles to biographies, coding to fairy tales, and classic chapter books to social-emotional learning texts. Along with being able to assign texts to students, students have options to choose self read texts or audio books. A word of warning is that students can search and possibly see books on topics that are not age appropriate. One should also be cautious of videos that are on the site and can be found during free searches as well. Overall, this is a great resource for parents to have hundreds of titles in one place for their children, and it is the perfect website for a listening to reading station for teachers in the classroom. 

LibraryThing

            The LibraryThing website is a database of more titles than you could imagine. This is a valuable resource for teachers of all disciplines and grade levels. Teacher resource books, picture books, young adult novels, new publications, and decades old titles are all available in the catalog. Searches for literature can be conducted by title, author, or tag (words associated with a title, such as genre or topic). Connected to each search are reviews, conversations, descriptions, editions, connected texts, and more. Study guides, author pages, and collections can also be accessed. While this may not be a tool to give elementary students free access to, it would be increasingly beneficial to secondary students for research. Teachers and parents alike, have virtually any title available to them at their fingertips to use as they see fit for their students.

These three websites are only a small fraction of the digital resources available to students, teachers, and parents who wish to be immersed in the world of literature. As our digital world expands, so will our technological sources. As long as the goal of these digital tools is to familiarize our students with literacy skills and texts, they are worth our time to explore and share with our young readers.

References

A home for your books. LibraryThing. (n.d.). Retrieved January 31, 2022, from
https://www.librarything.com/home 

Inc., E. C. (n.d.). Instantly access over 40,000 of the best books & videos for Kids on Epic.

Epic. Retrieved January 31, 2022, from https://www.getepic.com/

University of Maryland. (n.d.). ICDL - International Children’s Digital Library. Retrieved
January 31, 2022, from http://en.childrenslibrary.org/