Literacy has long been the key to communication and understanding, and education demands that we teach comprehension. Comprehension includes reading, writing, speaking, thinking and listening skills, and to be literate, students must master them all.

Adults who are literate are far more likely to have successful careers.

Now technology is changing literacy, thanks to digital content and how people engage with it. This metamorphosis is impacting education by demanding more of students in classrooms and educators who must teach the advanced skills of comprehension and analysis in every subject. Literacy involves using reading skills to investigate further, probe, and hypothesize about situations, and doing so requires new approaches in pedagogy.

As a result, edtech will be the future of literacy in education.

Young students learn to read, and older students read to learn. By incorporating digital technology in the classroom, teachers can support student comprehension with lessons that help young children build their skills in phonics, phonemic awareness, and fluency, while older students continue to expand the vocabulary and comprehension skills needed for studying all subjects.

Literacy is the pathway to learning all subjects, and edtech brings literacy instruction to life. 

How edtech will impact education

Educators ready for the future of literacy in education will rely on edtech to:

• Provide differentiation. Delivering just-in-time instruction to a classroom of twenty-five students with varying abilities is impossible. Adaptive learning makes it possible.
• Simulate experiences. Teaching abstract concepts has always been difficult, largely because it’s harder for students to understand something when they have no background knowledge. Tools like virtual reality can help to close that gap.
• Promote discussions about responsibility. Reading and writing are global activities that involve an author and the audience in new ways. Everything written and published on the Internet creates a digital footprint, and this content has a digital afterlife as well. Educators must teach students about the implications of their digital content.
• Offer an array of solutions. Teaching literacy will require that educators have a variety of apps for classroom use in every subject.
• Require new ways to communicate and collaborate. In the past, teachers taught in isolation, but edtech today allows teachers to share ideas and strategies with each other in real time.

In summary 

In my vision for the future of literacy in education, edtech will play a huge role in helping students develop the comprehension skills they need for success in a global world.

Edtech promises to be the cornerstone of that vision.