After reading an article found in the Reading Teacher, I learned how e-books or interactive/ electronic story books can be a great way to help increase the comprehension of students of varying reading ability levels in an interactive and motivating manner. Although I recently created an interactive story book in my graduate level technology course, I had not realized at the time how these types of stories can be used to increase reading development in ways other than by simply using the books in a similar format to audio books or books on CD. The article shared how a second grade teacher has her students create e-books or interactive story books to aid in comprehension and fluency. After the students listen to a piece of literature and discuss the book, each student fills out a graphic organizer in which they retell the events that took place in the book. The teacher then types the students’ retellings of the story as accurately as possible without changing the students’ natural language into a slide show program on her computer and also adds digital photographs and clip art. Later, the students are given the chance to record their voices reading their retellings. The slides are then placed together into a class e-book and loaded on to the classroom computers so that students can frequently re-read and/or listen to the class book. Overall, the activity helps aid in students’ comprehension since the activity involves retelling main ideas from a piece of text and also help increase students’ overall reading fluency by having students re-read a familiar text multiple times. In my opinion this is a fantastic way to help motivate the reluctant readers in a classroom because it will be engaging for students who enjoy creating something and also allows students to use the computer. If I was to make e-books in my own future classroom, I would even allow the students to type their own retellings. I am positive that students would enjoy using computers to complete a project like this and it would be a fun way to get students to read and comprehend a piece of literature. I will definitely keep this in mind for my future classroom. I already have a great example to show my future students since I created my own e-book this year. I would love to help my future students create their own e-books based on retellings of books we read and discuss in class. It also will be a great addition to any classroom library!
Read this article too!
Rhodes, J.A., & Milby, T.M. (2007). Teacher-created electronic books: Intergreating technology to support readers with disabilities. The Reading Teacher. 61(3), pp. 255-259.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
I think using the digital story book to put the information from the story map in is a great idea. I often have trouble getting students motivated to use a storymap but I think that "publishing" it to an electronic story book would work well in motivating them. I also like the idea of having the students read their summaries and recording them in the book.
ReplyDelete