Modern Day Considerations

I’ve decided to challenge myself a bit when it comes to literary analyses. Part of my education to be an educator required that I choose a concentration area. As much as I wanted to fill the great need for math and science teachers, humanities has always been my passion and strong suit, so I chose English as my concentration.
I do love my reading and writing, probably in a different way than many others. I have long time been a big fan of the non-fiction genre, as my desire to learn overpowers my desire to escape into a good novel, although I also enjoy the latter. As a result of my obsession with non-fiction reading (and believe me, it goes way, way back- to childhood really) I am not well read in the fiction genre, and less well read in many of the classic junior novels that will likely be part of the curriculum I will someday teach.
I decided that in order to familiarize myself with popular junior novels, despite my lack of time for recreational reading, I will start getting books on CD from my local library and listening to them when I am in the car. While listening to them, I can begin to think about questions I might use in discussions with my students, if I were to teach this book.
I started this yesterday with “The Giver” by Lois Lowry. I am only a few chapters in but I already have some great ideas of critical thinking questions that I might pose to my class. But one thing I didn’t expect was to have all kinds of thoughts regarding the actual experience of listening to audio books as opposed to the experience of reading them. Back when I was in school, cliff notes were the only cheater we had to reduce the work of actually reading a book (now I relish in the thought of reading for homework!) But in this day and age, there are so many new ways for children to access information that I feel it necessary to ask myself, “how would I handle this in my classroom- if children choose to listen to books instead of read them.” It also makes me wonder how teachers are already dealing with this situation.
I can see that there may be both positives and negatives attached to audio books.
The first positive that pops into my mind relates to accommodation for disabled students. If I get to choose a book to use for a lesson, it would be beneficial from an inclusion perspective to choose books which are readily available in audio format.
Another positive would be to utilize the audio format in collaboration with the text to help students integrate the material with both visual and auditory sensory input.
On the negative end, the experience of listening to the audio book tends to color the readers perspective of the characters, much the same as watching a film about a book does. The reader on the audio book adds his/her own voice to the characters and reads in such a way that the listener begins to model the character to match the readers voice, instead of using the tone, imagery and characteristics of each character to create an impression of their own.
Also on the negative end is the affect on technical details, such as becoming more fluent and learning new vocabulary and synthesizing the material, lack of retention and the ability to “space out” or get distracted when not focusing visually on the text.
In the age of technology, there are many other considerations to make when developing lessons and assignments in order to ensure students do not short change their education by using technology as a shortcut. Even reading has become techno-fied (yes, I made that word up).
On the other hand, for teachers, all this technology can be an incredible time saving method of staying fresh and current on the curricular material and obtaining new perspectives and ideas on how to approach discussions with students.