How to Digitalize What you Read?

Many people think of reading as a skill that is taught once in the first few years of school. All what teachers do is just to teach only new vocabulary and concepts relevant to new content. Seen this way, reading is a simple process: readers decode each word in a text and then automatically comprehend the meaning of the words. Do you think … this is the right understanding of reading?

Think for a moment about the last thing you read … an essay, a newspaper analysis, a report, a novel? If you could recapture your mental processing, you would notice that you read with reference to a particular world of knowledge and experience related to the text. The text evoked voices, memories, knowledge, and experiences from other times and places. As experienced readers read, they begin to generate a mental representation, or gist, of the text, which serves as an evolving framework for understanding subsequent parts of the text. As they read further, they test this evolving meaning and monitor their understanding, paying attention to inconsistencies that arise as they interact with the text. If they notice they are losing the meaning as they read, they draw on a variety of strategies to readjust their understandings ... an article about reading by Christine Cziko et al.

Reading, according to this view, is not only knowing some new words and concepts, but also knowing new experiences, cultures and other voices. Students need to adopt some strategies that can help them to learn how to read to make connections and build new perspectives. Week 5 provides me a variety of tools and ways to involve my students in reading texts and novels. Let's know more about how to make your students want to read not just for understanding but also for pleasure!

Objectives of Week 5:

During this week participants will:

• have an overview of the possibilities for developing learner's reading skills in a digital world
• discuss what they've acquired for their teaching toolkit and assess their own learning during the session

Tasks of Week 5:

Task 1 Creating Magazine Covers to Summarize Texts

During this task, we read a very great lesson plan. It is a comprehensive plan where you can find objectives, resources, tools and steps. Then, we were asked to choose an article from this link. It is really a very rich link where you can find a variety of articles that can be a guide for your teaching in the 21st century with its numerous requirements. The third step was to choose one of the following tools .. ReadWriteThink interactive tool, Fodey or Bighugelabs to create a magazine cover, news page, or brochure to summarize the article we chose earlier. I took a lot of time and effort to choose an article. All of them are so rich with ideas and thoughts.  At last, I selected an article by Marc Prensky "The 21st-Century Digital Learner". 

This article talks about involving students in making decisions about their learning. I do this with my students all the time. I listen to their views about their way to learn and what make them involved and like their school. We have to do this, because we talk about the life of a person not a pot. We have to give them a VOICE to tell us what they feel, what they need, and what they want to do. I just want to send this message to all teachers from all over the world .... PLEASE GIVE YOUR STUDENTS A VOICE .... I'M SURE THEY WILL SURPRISE YOU! Here is its cover using Bighugelabs. It is an innovative way to make connections and visualize new concepts. 

Task ... Cool Extra Idea: Publish Your E-book

In this task, we were asked to use Epubbud to publish our e-books. It is a great idea where we can feel ownership by creating our own books and let all people around the world read them and leave comments. By this tool, you will give your students a chance to e-publish themselves and create their own world. While surfing the internet about how to use Epubbud in my teaching, I found a wiki about this tool. It can be a beneficial resource for you to read and create your e-books to enrich your classrooms. For me, I created an e-book about some of the tools that we have explored during our Digital Tools e-course. Here is the link .... Happy Reading!

This is not the last task to do. There is another thing that I have to do before saying Good Bye EVO 2012. The next post will discuss how to use such tools adapting a lesson plan provided by our moderators in my own teaching context.