Goodreads, Literacy, and Education: Making Reading a 21st Century Experience
Community Review for Goodreads
My Take
It's no quiet issue that reading in America, especially among young people,has declined. Teachers can attest to the lack of reading for please among students not to mention for coursework. How do we help students become better readers? Goodreads is a resource that allows readers to collaborate, communicate, and join a variety of book clubs for discussion.
Engagement: Goodreads has many avenues of engagement, including "clubs" and "discussions"; it's very easy for a student to log in and quickly find a book, club or discussion that engages him or her.
Pedagogy: This source is certainly a catalyst for learning, and my thoughts would be that many students would learn from reading reviews, summaries, and comments. Although, the website doesn't use utilize a teaching method,but has many elements to learn from and teach with.
Support: The website is easy to use and has fairly easy navigation.
Overall, Goodreads is a wonderful sources for teachers, students, and parents, too. Do people learn from reading? This website places illustrations, reviews, quotes, and quick summaries of thousands of books at readers' fingertips, so I consider it one of the more valuable tools for literacy in the 21st century.
How I Use It
Goodreads is more useful for older/secondary/higher education students; it requires a login and might require some monitoring. That being said, I've found it to be a vaulable resource for students in secondary English writing and literature classes. Mainly, as a teacher, I juse it as a resource guide. For example, when discussing book reviews, students have to read other reviews of books by Goodreads members and discuss what was effective about The Hunger Games, for example.
Also, when writing about an author, Goodreads is a resources to discover more information about that author and what he or she may have written. Students then can compare and contrast not only the books an author has written but also how those different books were received. As a I teacher, I enjoy it's value in the literature classroom, but students enjoy the website as a collaborative, sharing community. Because students can engage and enjoy using it, and the teacher can use it also as a tool for reading, Goodreads is an interesting look at, what I hope, is a new turn in literacy engagement for the 21st century..