Some Tools to Facilitate Active Reading in the COVID-Disrupted Classroom

Looking for ideas on how to support and develop your students' reading skills when they are at home or sat at the back of the classroom and socially-distanced from you? Read on...

A variety of online tools have been developed in order to help teachers produce a piece of text / required reading and easily add questions / annotations to it.

One such tool is Curriculet. Curriculet allows teachers to add in questions (free-response and MCQs), annotations, definitions, links to videos and so on. You can use any physical/digital book or audio book, and upload from your school system. Unfortunately, it's not free, but there are a variety of pricing options, and it looks pretty slick.

Alternatively, hypothes.is is offering its services for free to educational institutions in 2020 (and maybe beyond). This is simpler than Curriculet in that it's "just" an annotation tool. As well as digital texts, it allows students to annotate other online sources e.g. material from webpages. Students can also tag their annotations, which allows similarities and differences between student annotations and responses to be identified and discussed. A nice feature of hypothes.is is that the annotation is collaborative, so students can see each other's comments and responses, and respond directly to those. This also means that teacher could, for example, add questions in as annotations.

My favourite tool, though, is currently Insert Learning, which has been developed by actual teachers, rather than techies who think they know about teaching and learning! It's free for the first 5 lessons you produce, and is a simple Chrome add-on (absolutely perfect for those schools already using G-suite products, but easy to use for anyone else really). It allows you to "insert learning" onto any webpage (which can include Google Docs). This can be questions and links, and student annotations on the webpage/document can be collaborative if you choose, so that they can see each other's comments and thoughts. You can even embed Kahoot questions or FlipGrid responses (see my blog post on FlipGrid). And because it doesn't seem to take too long to set up your questions, you could easily differentiate by producing different versions with slightly different questions. You can monitor student performance and give instant feedback, if you choose to use this tool in a "live" lesson.