Making Connections

An Analogy between Traditional and Online Text

Abstract

Reading online text presents unique challenges for elementary students as they develop and extend fundamental literacy skills to various media.  In considering the teacher’s challenge to help students with online reading tasks, we compared traditional and online texts.  Many text features such as titles, headings, authors, and copyrights are easily transferable from paper to an online format; however, orientation and navigation of text differ in online environments where text offers dynamic features not possible in a traditional print resources.  In considering traditional and online texts, we present a parallel comparison to illustrate how online texts mimic their analogue counterparts and highlight ways in which they differ, offering teachers a way to make learning more concrete for their students.