Abstract
Educators have focused their literacy education efforts on teaching children to code and decode words. In spite of all the efforts to teach literacy, the various report cards indicate that, perhaps, a new way of doing teaching literacy should be investigated. Today's media-centric youths could benefit from using mediated programs to help motivate them and talk to them in their own language. Several instances of successes using mediated tools for teaching and learning have been shown to improve word recognition, reading comprehension, and spelling skills and to boost reading scores and self-esteem. Digital Booktalk is a web portal that uses mediation to extend the techniques that have already proven successful in increasing children's interest in reading and understanding books. In its four sections, students are given the opportunity to match their interests with book titles, see trailers that help them visually organize the contexts from the books, and participate in learning activities that provide initial insights to vocabulary, characters, and themes. In addition, students are given the opportunity to create book trailers on their own with the possibility of having them published on the portal. It is believed that these types of activities will encourage students to correctly select books to read for completion and facilitate their making future selections. Research on the effectiveness of this portal are planned to collect and analyze empirical data. Future enhancements can be made to the project based on the results of this research.