Digital Bookmarks to Encourage Reading

I noticed this product in a bookstore today -- the Mark My Time Digital Bookmark.  It's a combination stopwatch-bookmark that will track or count down your child's reading time.  It's the "best and easiest way to monitor reading time and keep kids excited about reading so they'll want to read more."

This is a hard product to criticize.  The testimonials on their website prove that it works, and the marketing is all quite responsible.  We all have problems with time management nowadays, and clocks are a useful tool for improving discipline.

I wonder, though, if this subtly encourages too much clockwatching at too young an age, especially when used as shown in the photographs with the timer front-and-center.  Kids shouldn't be time-stressed like the rest of us.  I'm straying into serious Luddite territory here, but childhood isn't the time for everything to be quantized, digitized, and yoked to the machine.  Kids deserve free, unstructured time, or if it's structured then let that structuring be more indirect.  Surely a parent could keep track of time without delegating that task to the child or this device.

Though it's not stated explicitly, I get the impression that part of the digital bookmark's appeal is that it's an electronic gadget.  I guess it's never too early to promote gadget obsessions -- these kids are still too young for a cell phone (I think).

As I said before, I'm sure this works and that on balance it's fairly harmless.  When they release the WonkaZoid digital bookmark with video game and candy dispenser, then we're in trouble.

Comments

[TheBizofKnowledge]

Personally, I don't see the value of this kind of product. If a child needs to be "forced" to read for a certain amount of time each day, I don't think a digital bookmark will help with the task. After all, who's to say that the child won't spend that reading time fidgeting with the bookmark and/or simply watching the clock tick down instead of actually reading? A better way to monitor reading habits would be to read along with your child, or, at the very least, to stay in the same room during reading time.

[reader's mom]

I think you miss the point. We would all love to let our children free to read when they want, where they want and what they want. Because schools across America are now accountable for reading growth, they have parents and children fill out nightly reading logs that show how much time was spent reading (minimum 20 minutes on average). This product allows kids more freedom to get lost in a book, read in a hammock and let the bookmark track the minutes they have to report instead of having to sit in the kitchen with the microwave clock counting down, or worse have someone standing over you watching--THAT makes reading a chore.