Why is Online Picture Books Better?

[Note: if you’d prefer to watch a video of this information rather than read this post, just scroll down to the last video at the very bottom of the page!]

Reading picture books aloud is a staple of every preschool experience and every early elementary classroom. We use picture books to teach literacy, but also to teach about counting, colors, shapes, science, religion, social studies, relationship skills, emotional development… everything!

So, how do we move story time from the circle of kids on the floor surrounding a teacher with a book to an online classroom format? There are several options. I’ll start with the simplest, lowest tech version, and then give suggestions on other options for how to improve the experience. We’ll cover: reading a physical book, reading an e-book, showing a video and creating a slide show.

All the videos shown below were taken from recordings of actual Zoom meetings so you’re really getting a sense of what the kids see.

Read a Physical Book

In terms of technology skills, the easiest answer of all is to just hold a book in your hands and read it. If you’ve figured out how to attend a Zoom meeting and unmute yourself, you have all the tech savvy you need for this. You will obviously need a physical copy of the book to make this work.

You can make this experience look better by making sure you have a good internet connection, your video image is clear and well-lit and your mic picks up sound well. (Check out this tutorial on looking and sounding good on Zoom.) You can also think about choosing books that are small and light so they’re easy to hold, not too glossy (the light reflects off of them), and have good high contrast pictures with large text that’s easy to see on the screen. Check out this video for examples so you can see why this matters.

Another thing to consider: you could use a second device (phone or tablet) to call into the meeting, and set it up like a document camera aiming down at the book, then read the book while spotlighting the video from that device. If you set it up correctly, it can be easier to get the book to look good this way than holding it up in your hands.

Read an e-book

If you have an e-book you can read on the device you use for Zoom, then it’s easy to share your screen so the children can see the book, and read it aloud. It’s easy, and offers a great clear view of the book. You just have to have an e-book.

You could buy Kindle e-books from Amazon, of course. But there are also several libraries of online children’s e-books available. You may have free access through your local library or school district. For example, in Kirkland, WA, we can access Libby, Hoopla, Tumble Book Library and BookFlix through the library (For King County folks, learn how at: https://kcls.org/resources-types/ebooks-format/). And we can access Sora through our public school system. Check with your local library to see if you can do that. Or, some apps also have paid options, covered on their sites. For example, check out Epic Books.

Here’s a sample of what the ebook experience looks like for students. (Book is Earthquake by Bauer.)

Narrate a Video

If you know how to share screen, then you can share a video of a children’s book. If the video is good quality, children generally get a better view of the book using this method than they do with you holding the book up to the camera.

Using other people’s videos

There are TONS of YouTube videos with people reading picture books. So, whatever book you want to share with your students, try searching for it on YouTube, using the keywords “read aloud”. So, for example, search for “Goodnight Moon read aloud” and you will find many examples. They range a lot in quality, so be sure to preview! You COULD play the video with the audio narration by whoever made the video, but I would rather have my students hear MY voice than someone random. The only time I use someone else’s narration is if it’s something special, like the author of the book reading it, or someone reading a book about astronauts from the International Space Station!

I have a strong preference for playing the video with the volume muted and narrating it myself. Here’s an example of what that looks/sounds like. (vs. the original video.)

This generally works very well, but you definitely want to practice with the video in advance, because sometimes the narrator reads more slowly or more quickly than you normally would, or sometimes they stop to point out something on a page. Here’s an example of where I messed that one up! (The narrator paused at the end of a page, so I tried quickly naming all the planets to fill the time… then you see their finger pointing out each of the planets one by one as I stall… oops!)

Make Your Own Video

You could also pre-record your own video, if you’d rather do that then do a live reading during class. Set your camera on a tripod, or jerry rig a “document camera” with your phone, and make sure your lighting and sound are good. Then, you film it as you read the book, flipping through the pages as you go. Then edit the video as needed so it’s ready to show.

Sharing the Video

You could just have YouTube or your video set up on your computer ready to go, and when the time comes, just share your screen and read out loud.

I really prefer to have a PowerPoint with all my materials for class, including the video all set up perfectly so I just need to share the PowerPoint and don’t need to juggle in and out of other programs. Learn how to set up a PowerPoint for Zoom.

Make a Slide Show

If you have a physical copy of the book, you can take a picture of each page, then paste the pictures onto slides in a PowerPoint, then during class, share the PowerPoint. Here’s a sample, of Shadow Night by Chorao.

There are some advantages to this method: you can get really crisp, clear photos. You can edit out a few pages if the book is too long for your purposes. You completely control the timing. I like to engage my students in some books, asking questions like “can you see the duckling? where is it?” or “how many puppies do you see – can we count them together?” and that works better with these slide shows than it works to try to pause and un-pause a video for these interactions. The downside is that this method is more work than any other method! There is one important way you can speed up the work. Instead of using your phone camera to take the pictures, use a scanner app like Office Lens. It will save you a great deal of time! If you use your camera to take a picture of a page of a book, then you’ll have to crop the image to get rid of irrelevant background, and also the images tend to have a keystone effect, where the top of the page looks wider than the bottom of the page. Office Lens will fix keystoning and do the cropping for you. Below are samples of pictures I took with my regular camera vs. the pictures I took using Office Lens. Both were taken from the same angle with the same amount of time and effort (not much) put into snapping the picture. [Pictures from Sound by Trumbauer.]

So, the images from Office Lens are ready to insert into a PowerPoint without a lot of additional effort. And then your PowerPoint is ready to share in the Zoom meeting.

FYI, in a PowerPoint, you could choose to record a narration, and then save as a video that you could also use like the videos described above.

Copyright Issues

When you read a book in an online class, it is worth considering the question of copyright. (And if you’re using someone else’s copyrighted read-aloud video of a copyrighted book, well… that’s even more complicated.) And you should think about how and where you’re using it… reading it aloud once to an online class would be a very different use from recording a video of you reading a book and placing it on a monetized channel on YouTube where you’re getting ad revenue.

I will not pretend to be an expert on this at all! But here are links to a few relevant articles for you to consider.

If you are teaching online for Outschool, or another for-profit platform, rather than for a non-profit or public school, copyright may be more stringent. Read Outschool’s info on copyright.

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One thing that matters for copyright is whether a book is being used for “transformative activity” that supports a specific lesson. I think it’s always worth it for us to consider why we are choosing to read a specific book. Our book choice should always support a learning goal we have for that class and that group of students.

More Resources

I hope you’ve found my Zoom guide helpful. You may also want to check out these tutorials: Sharing Screens on Zoom, Music on Zoom, and Young Children and Zoom.

Here are the full contents of this post in video tutorial form for those who prefer that style of learning:

Updated 6/28/21

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A meta-analysis of 39 studies of children’s picture books finds that children score better on comprehension tests after reading a paper book than after reading a digital book. Photo: Sarah Garland/The Hechinger Report

Digital picture books have been a godsend during the pandemic. With libraries shuttered and bookstores a nonessential trip, many parents have downloaded book after book on tablets and smartphones to keep their little ones reading. The technology allowed my daughter to read the Berenstain Bears, a classic picture book series, to a younger cousin over Zoom when a family trip was canceled. Despite my wistful sentiments for paper and colored ink, I marveled at the bond that could be sustained over screens and pixels. 

But when the pandemic is over, many parents will face a dilemma. Should they revert back to print or stick with e-books? Do kids absorb and learn to read more from one format versus the other?

A new analysis of all the research on digital picture books, published in March 2021, helps to answer this question. The answer isn’t clear cut: paper generally has an edge over digital but there are exceptions. Digital books can be a better option with nonfiction texts and for building vocabulary. Some digital storybooks were better; researchers found that certain types of story-related extras seemed to boost a child’s comprehension but they were rare. 

In large part, the research on digital picture books for children echoes what we’ve seen in studies of e-books for adults. Reading comprehension is superior on paper but the benefit of paper appears to be stronger for adults and smaller for children. Scholars think the reasons behind the brain’s preference for paper may be different for the two groups. In the case of adults, it may be a lack of effort that we’re putting into reading on screens. In the case of children, it may be that many of the bells and whistles that are commonly added to digital picture books — buttons to click on, pop ups, games and sounds — are distracting.

Digital picture books have been around since the 1980s but there’s surprisingly little research that directly compares how much young children absorb in digital and in print and measures learning in a reliable way. A team of European researchers scoured the research literature and talked to experts around the globe and found only 39 studies that measured reading comprehension, vocabulary development or both. Many of the studies took place in the United States but this reading research has also been conducted in the United Kingdom, Canada, the Netherlands, Argentina, Thailand, Jordan and Israel. 

Children up to age eight were included in the studies. Some were old enough to read independently but listened to an audio narration of a digital book with headphones. In a study of the youngest children, under two years old, parents held their children in their laps for both formats. In the digital version, a recorded voice read a book about animals aloud as a parent tapped the screen to turn the digital pages. In the print format, the child heard her own parent’s voice reading the names of the animals that were pictured on the pages, such as a horse or a koala.

By chance, this toddler study showed stronger learning outcomes for the digital picture book. Gabrielle Strouse, an educational psychologist at the University of South Dakota who ran this experiment, told me many of the children in her study had never seen a digital book and the novelty of it may have been mesmerizing, causing the children to pay more attention. 

In most of the other studies, children were able to navigate the digital books themselves. Sometimes the digital texts were static just like the printed page. Other times, the text moved or changed to a bold font as the child heard the words.

Children were attracted to the many types of interactive buttons, pop ups and games that are embedded in digital books. A tap in the right place might play a noise. Children could seek treasures hidden on the screen. A retelling of Little Red Riding Hood might ask the child to color the character in with a virtual paintbrush or drag the character to perform an action. “It’s fun and enjoyable but it has nothing to do with the story,” said Natalia Kucirkova, a professor of early childhood development at the University of Stavanger in Norway.

Kucirkova, one of the authors of the March 2021 picture book meta-analysis, explained that her team wanted to learn which digital enhancements were working and which weren’t. They categorized all the add-ons as either story related or not story related. They found that the more unrelated bells and whistles, the worse a child’s comprehension was after reading the digital version of the story, compared to the print version.

Kucirkova believes that many digital books are overstimulating children and the unrelated add-ons are overtaxing a child’s “cognitive load.” 

“With digital books, children get a lot of stimulation from the different senses,” Kucirkova explained, as they take in letters and pictures with their eyes, sounds with their ears and tap the screen with their fingers. “The amount of information that an individual needs to process is bigger if you have a lot of stimulation. The feedback they get from the digital device overwhelms children.”

By contrast, the researchers found that story-related enhancements reinforced the narrative and improved comprehension. Repetition of new vocabulary words that were central to the story helped. One book prompted children to use the story characters in the digital book to build their own story. “Those creativity games are very conducive to story recall,” said Kucirkova.

Another digital book asked the child to share the story with someone else. Other effective digital prompts were directed at a parent, telling her or him what to point out or ask while reading a digital book with a child. In a book about a little frog, a parent could point and ask a question, “Could the frog be here?” simultaneously connecting with the child and the story line. In other words, actively reading a digital version of a picture book with your child is good for comprehension. 

“Even small digital enhancements actually make a lot of difference both ways, they can work well, or they can distract the child,” said Kucirkova. 

Built-in dictionaries, a common feature, worked both ways. The pop up definitions could distract children from the narrative, harming comprehension, but were effective in teaching new vocabulary words, which is desirable. For many early picture books that might not be a problem. For example, there was no narrative story at all in the book of animal names described above. 

Indeed, when the authors looked at the books in the 39 studies by genre, the digital version was generally better for nonfiction, where there often isn’t a narrative story line to follow. Fiction, by contrast, was generally better on paper.  

I talked with Virginia Clinton-Lisell, a reading specialist at the University of North Dakota who has studied digital books. She pointed out that the slight harm to reading comprehension may be worth it if the digital books are so engaging that your child reads more books. None of these 39 studies looked at whether children read more when they had access to digital books. 

“A parent shouldn’t be overly concerned about a small difference in comprehension for a particular book,” said Clinton-Lisell. “Bottom line, if it’s a digital book that gets your kid to read, that’s great.”

The most important audience for this study said Clinton-Lisell, is digital book writers and publishers. “We need to dig more into how to make the most out of digital books, how can we make them most effective,” she said.

For Kucirkova, improving digital books is a matter of “social justice”. “Unfortunately, many digital books are of really low quality,” she said. “We mustn’t forget that there are many families where reading is not an activity that adults enjoy and they might not enjoy it with their children. So in those families, having a book that reads to the child is a huge asset. At the very least, we need to equalize the quality of the two formats.”

“I’m not saying that the digital book can ever replace the loving adult.  I’m just saying that it can be a good substitute if there is nothing else,” she added.

This story about children’s picture books was written by Jill Barshay and produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

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