Community reviews for Actively Learn

I like using Actively Learn versus paper for some comprehension assignments, especially activities with a lot of opinion questions/activities. My students love that after they enter their answer they are able to see how classmates responded. I have found it generates a rich discussion and provides an easy way for students to help each other and to broaden their understanding of different points of view. I like that PDFs from 1 year are available later without me having to re-import. It is easy to assign content to students, either whole class or groups. It would be wonderful to have more content for my students, but I understand that they are not the target population and I am not prevented from adding my own content.

I like this site. I have an American Literature class that I want to use this site with. By allowing me to create questions that I can connect right to the word or line they are reading helps keep the students focused on understanding deeper aspects of the literature. Each question can be tagged with a common core standard. The site also keeps track of home much time the student spent reading the work, so you can see if the student just rushed through the assignment. Actively Learn has designed a powerful tool.

Overall, I think this tool holds much potential for improving comprehension of and engagement with texts in my secondary ELA classes. I like the ability to find pre-annotated texts from other teachers. This potentially saves me time. My students benefit greatly from finding texts delivered in a responsive interactive forum, wherein discussion occurs in real time as students can see comments or questions for their classmates as they read the text. Also, I like the fact that I can continually check for comprehension to make sure students recognize different aspects, points, or questions sparked by the text as they read through the embedded questions that they have to answer before moving on in the text. This proves a great gain in making sure that students actually read, and making sure that they understand what they read. The only two limitations that I have faced in using Actively learn is the limited availability of contemporary literature, even when students are willing to pay to read/ explore a particular text, and the fact that the text is enlarged and reading pane narrowed such that students see a short story as novel or novella length. The availability issue could be challenging when facing a contemporary student body that often struggles to engage with or see the value of classic texts. The length issue, while seemingly trivial, draws some readers away as they see a lengthy text as an insurmountable challenge that they do not want to attempt. Even if there was some note to suggest to students the true length, as counted in MS Word pages, would alleviate this problem. That said, Actively learn, has already shown the ability to better engage students as I found that more students read and were prepared to discuss the text due to text delivery format.

Actively learn requires little set up, and I didn't find it time consuming to create an assignment. The data received was perfect. Even in the free version, I could see which students were struggling, I could see which question each class struggled to answer effectively, and I could assign and receive feedback easily. The students asked more questions because they could see which questions they did not perform well on. It led to great discussions of each chapter. Some drawbacks I found were to be careful how many questions you embed into the assignment. You have the choice of bulk grading as a function, but then you miss out on the great feedback that can inform your instruction. At times the program did "think" a lot. The paid version requires you to go through hoops just to get a meeting to consider a purchase, and while most districts may be able to afford the price for the paid, I found it to be expensive for our school district. I believe you would gain access to how your students perform by standard, which would be awesome. The free version has tons of promise, and I will continue to experiment with it throughout the year.

Teachers need to be careful with copyrighted texts, as stated in the Terms of Use. Some of the texts do cost money per student, which could get expensive, but a majority of texts are available for free. It would be great to have the ability as a teacher to "curate" a textbook of my own from existing texts into one file, and it would also be great to be able to edit the text itself once it's uploaded into the system, both features I'm sure are forthcoming.

I enjoyed this piece. I would like to it be easier for students to move through the text without having to stop at all of the questions.

When I first found Actively Learn, I was very excited about it. The ability to drop questions into a text is huge. The fact that many texts already have common core aligned questions for use is also a big deal. I found that in my role as an English teacher, it worked really well for teaching short stories. They have a decent selection, and short stories don't require very much time. That said, there are two major issues that keep me from using it as the only way my students read. First, the texts that are usable with the site are fairly limited. You can submit other texts for addition, but only things that are already in the public domain. I get that copyright laws exist, but it can be awkward to adjust your entire course to be taught around only free texts - for one thing, it severely limits your ability to do anything modern with your students. This isn't their fault; books cost money, and I get that. Unfortunately, it does hinder the site's capabilities. The second problem is that computer screens are not particularly conducive to long-term reading. My students have mentioned that even with the 20-20-20 rule (every 20 minutes of looking at a screen look at something 20 feet away for 20 seconds), they prefer reading from books because their eyes feel much fresher when they get done. Again, not really something that can be fixed.