Close Reading Made Easier with Built-in Supports and Collaboration
Community Review for Actively Learn
My Take
Actively Learn is a protected e-reader that allows teachers to embed scaffolding, collaboration, and assessment into a text. Teachers are able to provide students assistance and motivation needed for close reading.
Actively Learn starts off as a free service, but its best features come at a cost. The best feature being the in-depth student data. It can take some time to scaffold a document for students, but can easily be shared with teachers in your building or district. Ready-made text is available in the Actively Learn catalog, however most of the content is for middle and high school students.
Actively Learn has a lot to offer to enhance close reading instruction across curricular areas.
How I Use It
I have used Actively Learn with my elementary students for close reading text. I was able to take an article I found online and scaffold in questions and notes. The same can be done with Google Docs and PDFs. Students were able to annotate and collaborate with their peers while reading. The text was now accessible for all students with the built in dictionary, text to speech, translation, dyslexic friendly font, and numbered paragraphs. Students worked at their own pace and I was able to monitor student progress and assist those who needed extra help while providing feedback in real time.