We should start by telling you what this book is not. This book is not about how children learn to read (though we do highlight some essentials on that subject). Nor is it about how to teach children to learn to read (though we hope it sparks some ideas). This is a book with technology coursing through every page, but it is not a book about how digital media and new technologies will rescue schools and save the world. Nor, however, is it a book about how those technologies are destroying any good chance of raising readers for the next generation.

So what is it? This book presents a third way, an approach to technology that is driven by the urgent need for all children and parents to have access to the same twenty-first-century literacy opportunities already at the fingertips of today's affluent families. We worry that without pushing for better quality within, and access to, learning environments that harness media, low-income households will get the short end of the stick. Our firm commitment in writing this book is to stimulate a more informed debate about equity in a new age: we cannot allow technology to exacerbate social inequality instead of opening more opportunities for everyone to succeed.

To carve this new path, we will take you—today's teachers, parents, and change-makers everywhere—on a journey into the spaces of digital-age literacy learning that are still a mystery for many: the continually evolving app stores, the little-known research labs of e-book scholars, the home-based services for first-time mothers and their babies, the classrooms of elementary schools in high-need areas, and the family literacy programs that are helping immigrant families. We want to show you the state of literacy and children's reading at this tumultuous, technologically driven moment—and what it could look like if we forged ahead with some new ways of thinking and teaching to help a greater number of kids. We hope this book will serve as a guide to new ideas for raising the next generation of critically thinking, accomplished readers.

Young children, ages zero to eight, are our focus. Literacy learning happens throughout the life span, of course, but we wanted to figure out what it means to teach children to become literate when they have been born into a world in which smartphones, touchscreen tablets, and on-demand video are nearly ubiquitous. Which features and habits related to these new technologies will serve them well? What should be avoided? How might the answers differ for different children in different circumstances?

We also aim to be inclusive and expansive in our use of the words media and technology. In the past decade or more, these two words have taken on narrow connotations that lead to even narrower debates about what is best for children's learning. Hear “media” and you may think primarily of mass media (CNN, Fox, and so on) or anything delivered via video. Hear “technology” and you may automatically envision smartphones, electronic whiteboards, or tablets. We see those examples as only part of the world of media and technology. Books—printed or electronically available—are also a form of media. Printers, voice recognition software, and video cameras count as technology too.

Your guides on this journey are me—Lisa, a journalist and director of the Early Education Initiative and the Learning Technologies Project at New America, a think tank in Washington, D.C.—and me—Michael, a child development and policy expert and founding director of the Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop in New York City. Throughout the book you'll see us pop in once in a while to distinguish who is telling which anecdote, but the vast majority of the research and reporting that went into this book was conducted in partnership over a more than two-year span that involved many members of our teams and contract writers, reporters, and video producers.

The seeds for this book were planted in early 2012 in a series of conversations with Ralph Smith of the Annie E. Casey Foundation. Ralph had just launched the Campaign for Grade-Level Reading, an ambitious national effort to catalyze and coordinate early literacy efforts and philanthropic investments in more than 150 cities and towns around the United States. Lisa had spent more than a decade reporting on education and technology and had written the book Screen Time: How Electronic Media—From Baby Videos to Educational Software—Affects Your Young Child. Michael was directing a series of research studies on how interactive technologies were affecting families, students, and teachers, and advising one of the world's most successful nonprofit educational media organizations on how best to navigate a fast-changing digital marketplace while making children's interests central. Ralph wondered whether the two of us might be able to scan the landscape of literacy products and literacy interventions for young children to see where technology was playing a role. The result was our report, Pioneering Literacy in the Digital Wild West: Empowering Parents and Educators, which came out in December 2012. The report caught the attention of Jeff Schoenberg and J. B. Pritzker of the Pritzker Children's Initiative, which provided a generous grant to allow us to continue our research, create an advisory group that intersected with the Campaign for Grade-Level Reading, and develop a book and online space that would showcase what we were learning.

We say “create” a book, not “write” a book because from the beginning we wanted to include video and graphics as well as written narrative. We wanted to explore not only how children were learning to read in an age of new media but also how book publishing could harness new media to tell stories and increase understanding among educators and parents. As you will see in part 3, we have produced five videos that provide a window onto new initiatives that hold promise. (If you are reading the print version or non-enhanced e-book version, you will find hyperlinks that take you to these videos.) Barbara Ray and Sarah Jackson of HiredPen, a communications firm in Chicago and San Francisco, coordinated the video shoots and directed the videos with Chicago-based videographer Nat Soti and his team.

The collaborative nature of this book also opened our eyes to what is possible with shared writing-and-reading spaces online. For sure, we had our share of tech-induced mishaps, and we relied on print on paper in several cases. But we would not have been able to write this together without Google Docs' functionality that allowed many of us to be writing and commenting in the margins of one document while sitting in several different cities simultaneously. We also used tools such as Skype to conduct interviews with scholars overseas. We were almost perpetually using search-and-find functions and tapping into online archives of journal articles to pinpoint materials and discover new experts. Hours of thinking and exchanging ideas happened through e-mail and chat.

Along this journey, after becoming inspired by dozens of brilliant early educators and innovators, we started to see an alternative to simply reacting to the new media marketplace and constantly lamenting what the technology industry brings forth. The alternative is not to retreat to the twentieth century. Instead we suggest ways to proactively shape children's literacy environments and envision a future that marries the best of the old with the potential of the new. We want to act on the research about effective strategies to help children become literate, while enlisting help from innovative educators and media of all kinds, from books to video to twenty-first-century tools such as tablets and e-readers. We want to stop seeing technology and reading as in opposition to each other, and instead start building places, online and off, that put media in service of reading and, more broadly, in service of literacy and critical thinking for all kids.

Teaching, parenting, and learning in these newly envisioned places will require a new approach. Public policies and private organizations will have to shift their conceptions of education and learning downward in age, positioning the early years of children's lives—including those first few years of infancy and toddlerhood—as the foundational years for literacy. Communities will need to ensure equitable access to broadband Internet and media mentorship opportunities for low-income families. And policymakers will need to open their eyes to the assets among families of different linguistic and cultural backgrounds that, when given the right support, can help children learn to read, write, and become effective communicators in English and their home languages.

For parents and teachers in particular we argue that today's children will be best served by adopting a Tap, Click, Read mindset. Not a tap, click, cringe, and hope-for-the-best mindset, but one imbued with that word read, guiding children toward literacy and learning in multiple interactions with media throughout their early years. The pages that follow introduce you to- many of the educators and leaders we met who have already embraced this mindset. It looks something like this:

Tap: Instead of just tapping open apps, let's not be afraid to tap into new networks of learning for our children and for ourselves as adults. Today's media allow for educators and families to access rich worlds of content and ideas beyond their homes and communities. We should also be mining forgotten or hidden public assets, like libraries and public media.

Click: We need to recognize that to click is to choose, to make a decision, to act. Marketers and their clickbait have made us think we have no choice. But clicking is not and should not be mindless. When a child or parent clicks inside a text, they have opted to dig further, they wonder what is beyond. Let's embrace that as an opportunity and pathway that could be filled with intention—not as a distraction.

Read: Everyone interested in the success of future generations should recognize that reading will always be a critical skill and a key barometer of progress. You cannot fully function in the twenty-first century without being able to read. You cannot achieve any kind of success without literacy. We also should recognize that the contours of literacy have evolved and expanded over time, and now even more skill and attention are required to teach it well.

Many educators and parents are already pursuing this tap, click, read approach without even realizing it. They are our future advocates for blended literacy environments that harness the potential of media in all forms. By using a research-based approach that combines skill building with knowledge building, they will help raise children who are able to read and write, not only via print on paper and screen, but also via symbols and images, all the while “reading” the motivations of the authors and creators who put this media in front of us. You'll see many of them in this book, and we anticipate meeting many more in the coming years. This journey isn't over. On our websites, on TapClickRead.org, and through social media, we will be continuing to document and write about how teaching and learning literacy are changing. And we will maintain our focus on serving children and families in households who are likely to have the least access to high-quality learning environments, online and off. At a time when social mobility seems to have stalled for so many families, the act of learning to read and becoming a literate citizen of the Digital Age remains the most powerful engine for moving up. The stories of this book are, at heart, about making a life-changing imprint on the next generation.