Last August I joined a program offered through ETFO called Reflections on Practice. It is a part of the Women's Leadership Institute.

The program offers teachers an opportunity to do a small action based research project with support and lots of professional development opportunities. The program includes three face-to-face sessions. As well as monthly online meetings.

We were encouraged to pick something to base our research on that was of interest to us and connected to our current teaching environment. Something that was the pebble in our shoe...

The mission was to figure out what the pebble in my shoe was - something that was a concern related in some way to my teaching and develop an action research idea based on it.

I wanted to tie my research into what I would already be involved in for the year. As later literacy coach....
I had a 50 minute time slot each day dedicated to reading intervention. I wanted to improve the program. I wasn't convinced the reading group format used in the past was the most effective way to support these struggling readers.

I knew that the school was already involved in research with the iPads.... I decided to introduce iPads into the reading intervention program to hopefully increase attendance and engagement.

To qualify for the program students must be reading below a grade five level at the outset. Most were reading at a grade 2-3 level. This year the reading intervention program targeted the reading strategies each student needed to develop further.

The reading sessions worked to develop the areas of need. Word decoding, reading fluency and comprehension. The plan was to have the reading program use iBooks in place of traditional books for this research. There were 18 grade seven and eight students in the program.

The program faces several difficulties unique to students in these grades.

 Lack of appropriate texts: the traditional ‘hi interest/lo readability’ levelled readers are often not appealing to middle school students; the texts’ outward appearance is often very juvenile; or the content can be much too mature.

 Social Issues: the students do not want their peers to know they need this type of reader; students do not want to be pulled from their regular classes and peer group to read, these students often have a negative attitude towards reading and do not want to spend this extra time reading.

The AR plan was to test student reading levels at the outset of the action research in the fall and then again in the spring. To measure the increase in reading levels in comparison to past years. In the interim the students would be doing all their reading in the literacy program using iBooks.

Students who are reading well below grade level in grade seven and eight face unique difficulties. The texts used in their regular classes have become increasingly complex. The curriculum expects intermediate students to have progressed from learning to read to reading to learn. Teaching the support features of an application such as iBooks provides transferable skills which struggling readers can utilize to navigate required texts.

IBooks provides tools that can support struggling readers in many ways that a traditional book cannot: Differentiation is built-in to the iBooks application.

The “speak” and “define” features are useful to navigate more difficult texts.

The font size can be changed; the background can be switched to black, this is often helpful for tracking text.

This may be my favorite feature of iBooks:

No one knows what is being read. Students are self conscious of peers seeing them reading juvenile looking books. IBooks completely eliminates this concern.

Result - increased attendance in program. Students are more willing to leave class due to:
The appeal of using the ipad.
The elimination of the embarrassment of the type of book they are reading.

Students in grade seven and eight who struggle with basic reading skills have not experienced an enjoyment of reading. Books symbolize struggles, failure, shortcomings, humiliation. Technology does not hold the same negative associations for these at-risk readers.

They read regularly on social media and navigate their way through youTube and various search engines. The positive associations these students have with technology are transferred into their e-book reading experiences. The iBooks application ‘levels the playing field’ a bit for struggling readers.

Flashcard+ is an app that I used to support the reading program.
Used to do error word drills. Students actually enjoy working through their word lists.
Most of these students would never do this with regular flash cards

Fountas and Pinnel Running records were used to establish all baseline reading levels.

Tribuzzi, J. (2014)
"Bridging Modern and Traditional Literacy." Leading the New Literacies. By M. Fisher. N.p.: Solution Tree Press, p25-53.

Walsh, M., & Simpson, A. (2013).
Touching, tapping... thinking? Examining the dynamic materiality of touch pad devices for literacy learning. Australian Journal of Language & Literacy, 36(3).

Hutchison, A., Beschorner, B., & Schmidt- Crawford, D. (2012).
Exploring the use of the iPad for literacy learning. Reading Teacher, 66(1), 15–23.

The reading assessments administered calculate the words per minute read by each student. This is used to measure reading fluency.

Spring testing identified very positive results in reading fluency or speed.
In my experience an increase of 20 Wpm is a good improvement. Take a look at some of these scores.

The use of the iBooks application resulted in the achievement of a higher increase in reading scores than in past years. Students in the reading intervention program had improved attendance and noticeably more engagement in the program.

Students regularly requested that I share the books we were reading in e-book format with them. They wanted to read them on their own devices, in class and at home! This did not occur with the use of traditional texts.

To increase the amount of information produced by the action research, I would like to include teacher and student surveys. A more formal qualitative component would allow the increase in student engagement and motivation to be more comprehensively documented.

Existing research indicates that educators must facilitate opportunities which engage students in the development of 21st Century literacy skills.

IPads, and specifically the iBooks application, offer a new approach to reading intervention for middle school students. It is inline with the direction that our school in moving in.


Struggling readers need to learn to utilize all the reading support features offered by the iBooks application.

Students involved in reading intervention programs need additional support in developing literacy and e-literacy skills. This action research looked at the iBooks application as a tool to effectively teach both literacy and e-literacy.

The multi-modal nature of iPads has made them popular and effective in special education programs. The iBooks application's accessibility options and customizable features make it ideal for a reading intervention program.

To utilize the iBooks application to support students with dramatic reading deficits, seems like an infallible choice.