AVReading April: Using Online Texts
When I set out to do a study in 2009, I was convinced that the affordances of digital texts was going to level the playing field in our schools. My theory was that much of our inequity in education had to do with access. Students who could readily access the textbooks and information of schools would succeed, while those who did not would struggle. Therefore, we just needed to make these texts more accessible to more students and all students would have the means to do well. I now realize that my thinking was, at best, a little incomplete. The beauty of completing the study was that I began to realize the complexity of the situation. Not only did I come to the conclusion that our educational problems reached much farther than access to text, but that even the wonderful affordances of digital texts were not really all that wonderful for a striving reader....