Hi. We’ve creating “interactive” versions of our books using the three types of activity pages. At the end of each book there are series of questions to test comprehension of the story, vocabulary and other simple questions to enhance the learning experience.
The results, testing our books in reading workshops and the classroom, has been extraordinary. The kids view the books as a “game” and they demand to read book after book to play again.
Since they think it is a game, they ask to know their “score”. I think it would be a good feature, it would encourage them to go read the book again (or at least the questions) to improve their score. It could also help us in doing studies of the effectiveness of the material.
We’re new to Bloom - and to the work of creating children’s books for the purposes of developing literacy and reading skills - the activity pages are really effective, in our experience, arguing in a powerful way for putting books online. I wonder if other have other ideas or experiences about what features, whether in Bloom or not, that improve the learning experience and motivate kids.
We are working, I guess like many using Bloom, in languages which have been predominately oral and for which very little text of any kind exists. In addition to creating books, we need to convince people that it is interesting and valuable to learn to read in their mother tongue. In our experience, the children embrace it almost instantly, the parents, who cannot read their mother tongue themselves, are deeply skeptical. It is another dynamic to our situation where specific features or design of books might help.