Information and digital literacy in education via the digital path

As teachers and educators it behoves us to raise our students critical awareness to this informational dilemma. We need to make sure they are equipped with the required skills to help them navigate and browse the web in a safe and productive way.  One way to do this is through enhancing their critical digital search literacy. We have already covered a number of interesting materials in this regard and you can check this resource to discover some practical search tips to share with your students.

Glose for Education is a digital reading platform that offers a wide variety of interesting features to help students engage in interactive and meaningful reading experiences.

First, let’s acknowledge this universal epidemic. College students despise reading textbooks and e-books that cover content with academic information. Fortunately, I discovered a cure for the reading plague that only requires five teaspoons of ingestion: 1) survey 2) question 3) read 4) retrieve and 5) review. In my class, I have found the SQ3R Method to be a step-by-step approach to learning and studying from textbooks. Although it took my students time and practice to master this method, it has been valuable in regards to preparing students for more content-driven class discussions, increased retention and understanding of information, strategic study skills, and test preparation.

Think about a book you read last year. How much of it do you remember? Could you list ten things you learned from it? Can you even remember what books you read last year? Back in school, you actually had to remember what you’d read. Tests, term papers, and book reports were all just ways to help you retain that information. So engineer Robert Heaton invented a three-step system for reading a book like a student. (And if you are a student, it might be better than your current habits.)

A couple of people have recently asked about a tool I developed to teach critical reading, so I thought I’d blog about it to add a bit of context to what is basically a workshop handout.

Working in a one to one context as a Learning Developer with students on assignments like literature reviews has allowed me to see behind the scenes of how students approach this task. What I’ve noticed is a mismatch between some of the feedback on the written product “Unfocussed! Doesn’t flow! Needs to be structured better! Too descriptive!” can actually be traced back to issues around reading and note-taking, not writing.

 CommonLit is a free website that helps students develop advanced reading and writing skills. It serves hundreds of thousands of students in classrooms across the United States. CommonLit gives teachers access to a full free digital curriculum that enables teachers to assign texts to students, score written responses, send real-time feedback and collect analytics on student progress.

How to Read a Book  by Mortimer J. Adler and Charles Van Doren is one of the most celebrated classic works in the reading literature. It was first published in 1940 and then revisited and updated in an edition that was released in 1972. Since its publication millions of copies have been sold and is still widely circulating among education circles as a required reading text. It’s true that the book was conceived in a ‘pre-digital’ era but its content is still relevant even now that the digital text is predominantly prevalent.

As many of us might have already realised, there is reading where you just look at the book and there is actually reading. With the former, you might get through the chapter faster, but will end up coming back to the same pages to remind yourself of what exactly you read. Have you found yourself doing that lately? Do not fear, we will share a technique to bring your reading to a higher level and also give general tips on managing your readings well!