Whooo's Reading

This is a solid tool for supporting reading comprehension, writing development, and student agency. While it's no substitute for teacher-guided, book-specific activities, the focus on student-selected books and written responses can be a valuable, supplemental component of an independent reading program. For younger students in particular, Whooo's Reading encourages students to read more and to thoughtfully reflect on what they read. The big selling point is that this system focuses on open-ended responses rather than multiple-choice questions, and it's a nice way to encourage students to think critically, reflect, and develop their thinking about what they read. So many other tools for reading bog things down with stale books and a battery of knowledge check questions, but Whooo's Reading intentionally avoids that.

That being said, some of the automated features can hamper a truly personalized experience. The automatically generated questions can be a bit too general, and the automatic scoring feature can sometimes reward responses that don't really show deep understanding of a book. Teachers can edit these scores, of course, but this illustrates the site's main limitation. This site works best when teachers build on its automated features by adding their own writing prompts, or better yet by inviting students to create their own, book-specific questions. This means a bit more work for the teacher, but it also might offer a clearer picture of students' reading comprehension and overall progress. Plus, kids are smart: They'll likely be more engaged if they sense that their teachers plan to review their responses rather than leaving the grading up to the robots. Overall, this is a helpful way to develop close reading and support passionate independent reading, especially if teachers tailor its features to fit their students.