CD-ROM and Internet electronic materials are readily available to help you develop phonemic awareness and phonic skills. Three approaches to phonics instruction, the synthetic, analytic, and analogy approaches, are major ways authors have structured phonics programs. There are online lessons and materials for teaching not only phonics but whole word approaches as well, including sight word development, the language-experience approach, and word banks. Strategies for using the cloze technique for developing word recognition can be easily converted to electronic formats.

The Internet contains exemplars for developing meaningful vocabulary, including puzzles and word games, and you can to use instructional cloze activities to develop word meanings. In addition, major resources for developing reference skills are available online, including dictionaries, encyclopedias, almanacs, newspapers and magazines (e-zines) as well as directories and other special references. Using recent electronic features, you can help students develop study skills through inserting comments into documents, highlighting materials with color, copying and pasting between documents, summarizing, and outlining.