Is Sparx Reader promoting too much screen time?

We absolutely understand the significant concerns that teachers and parents rightly have around young people and their exposure to screens. Much has been commented on in this space, and we are in full agreement that limits must be imposed on adolescents’ screen time, especially when that time might be spent engaging with content that is corruptive in nature.

However, reading rates are in crisis, nationally, and there is an urgent need to re-teach the habit of careful, controlled reading. In today’s tech-heavy world, our young people are constantly skimming and scrolling bombardments of content and, despite being screen-based, Sparx Reader in fact encourages pupils to use screen time in a different way: to slow down, to concentrate, and to pay close attention to the narratives they are reading. 

It is impossible for a teacher to know exactly how much, if any, reading is taking place in a busy library lesson or when reading is set as homework. If teachers are to support struggling readers and celebrate successful readers, they need to be able to see detailed information about every student’s reading.

What do ebooks enable? 

The Sparx Reader library necessarily uses ebooks because that way we can: 

• provide teachers with full visibility of their students’ reading in terms of accuracy, time and book choice;
• allow teachers to quantify independent reading in a measurable way that is much more specific than simply ‘time spent’;
• provide books to students that are closely matched to their reading ability;
• ask students questions regularly to check that they have been reading in a focused and careful way;
• disincentivise skim reading, or scanning for answers, by removing the text from view before asking the questions;
• give students immediate evidence of their reading success;
• compartmentalise the sometimes-daunting process of tackling an entire book;
• and adapt the amount of points given to pupils based on their reading speed, to level the playing field for readers of all abilities.

Improved accessibility 

Further, the accessibility settings that are available on Sparx Reader mean that pupils can change the background colour, font type and size, and add in a line guide to ease the reading process.

Students have access to contextual definitions 

Students reading ebooks on Sparx Reader can also click on any word to access a context-aware definition of that word immediately meaning they don't have to locate the right definition elsewhere themselves, and can stay immersed in the story. (You can find more information about this here: What are 'Contextual definitions'?)

They can access their reading anywhere

An additional benefit to ebooks is that they are accessible anywhere, at any time: Sparx Reader works on any device with a browser. Frighteningly few students have books at home; the ease with which students can access books on Sparx Reader overturns this inequality. 

Ebooks are egalitarian 

A huge upside to ebook reading for young people - reluctant readers especially - is that the exact type of book is concealed from a pupil’s peers. A struggling pupil who is possibly embarrassed by the type of book they are reading in a public setting - a library lesson for example - because it may be overtly aimed at younger readers, may feel disheartened by their obvious weakness, and be unlikely to persevere. Ebooks are wonderfully egalitarian in this regard. 

In conclusion, Sparx Reader is a productive and controlled way of harnessing the power of technology for good in this digital age, creating resilient learners who are willing to persevere.