20
I spotlight in this column Actively Learn™, a comprehensive reading platform to enrich digital texts geared for grades four and beyond. As schools are transitioning to 1:1 learning environments, teachers need support with leveraging online platforms for reading digital text. Actively Learn™ offers a free plan, or teachers can opt to upgrade to a personal plan ($18/mo). Both plans allow teachers to scaffold and assess reading.
With Actively Learn™, teachers can create interactive assignments or opt to assign preexisting Actively Learn™ materials to students. Digital text becomes interactive through highlighting, collaborative annotations, guiding questions, hyperlinks, and inserted media. Reading aids such as text-to-speech, clickable dictionary definitions, translations, and dyslexic settings make the text within this platform accessible to all learners. Teachers can strategically place multiple choice, polls, or short answer questions after chunked text and require student response before releasing the next text section. All of these supports assist a reader’s transaction with text and allow reading and writing to become fused together in online environments.
What I appreciate most about Actively Learn™ is its alignment to best practices for reading comprehension. Below I discuss how Actively Learn™ supports deep thinking within text by 1) building schema, 2) supporting metacognition, and 3) motivating readers. Last, I share how the teacher dashboard provides detailed proficiency reports to formatively assess student progress.
Building Schema.
The crucial role of schema, or background knowledge the learner brings to the text, is widely recognized. When students are able to relate text to previous experiences, comprehension improves. For students who lack familiarity with the text or topic, Actively Learn™ allows the teacher to “fill in” these gaps by inserting media or teacher annotations within the digital text. Consider the example shared in Figure 1 using the song lyrics “Glory” from the motion picture Selma. To tap into or build student schema, the teacher provided an annotation along with an image attached to the line “King pointed to the mountain top and we ran up.” This annotation and attached image allowed the teacher to connect the song lyrics to Dr. Martin Luther King’s I Have a Dream speech. Additional media options available to embed within Actively Learn™ include video and web articles.
Tara Kingsley, Ph.D, is an Assistant Professor of literacy instruction at Indiana University Kokomo. Tara’s research interests revolve around the use of technologies to support literacy and higher order thinking skills in online environments.
TECH TIPS
Actively Learn™ for Active Reading
By Tara Kingsley
