Technology is helping teachers do more and more every day, including building a love of reading in their students. With more distractions for students than ever before, these tech tools not only engage students, but also offer a variety of interesting texts and exciting reading options that keep their attention.
Use these websites and tech tools to engage students and help them develop a love of reading.
Kids are curious about everything, and Wonderopolis harnesses this innate characteristic with a kid-friendly, non-fiction reading website. Each article is created to answer a question and students can choose from a variety of categories, including technology, science and arts and culture. Students can also take quizzes to test their knowledge after reading, and refer to a vocabulary list when they come across a word they don’t know.
Dogo is a news website for kids, and provides them with a library of digital books and movies as well. Students can read stories from a number of kid-friendly categories, including social studies, amazing, sports, 'did you know' and more. Many students don’t know what they like to read yet, and this website allows them to explore all topics and figure that out.
While Dogo is fun for students, allowing them to read kid-friendly versions of current event news stories, it’s an ever better tool for teachers. When signed up, they can create assignments, add media (books, news stories and movies) to the assignment, and keep students engaged with a social learning dashboard.
Your tech tools don’t have to be reading-focused to help students learn to love reading. With Kahoot!, you can make reading fun by creating and playing book-based games that help students engage with the content in a whole new way.
Some fun examples include:
- Create an interactive quiz to test students’ knowledge of characters, plotline and themes.
- Run a real-time survey of what students think of various aspects of the reading they recently completed. Use that to spin-off into a class discussion.
- Have students create their own interactive character quizzes to give to peers. For example, each question is a clue to what character the student likes most.
Sometimes students don’t want to read because they don’t know what topics, authors or genres they enjoy. With Whooo’s Reading, students are extrinsically motivated to read, which pushes them to read more and discover the books they love, ultimately building a life-long love of reading.
Unlike other reading tools, students aren’t required to read specific books, and instead are empowered to choose for themselves. After logging reading, answering standards-aligned questions, and interacting with peers in their private class-wide newsfeed, students earn Wisdom Coins that can be “spent” on virtual accessories in the Owl Store.
What’s more, teachers can use their Data Dashboard to track what and how much students are reading, in addition to Lexile Levels, reading scores and more.
This one-of-a-kind tool makes reading more interactive and engaging by allowing students to select audio to go with their text. Students can use their “soundtrack” while reading alone, or work together to create a soundtrack as a class for group or teacher reading.
Students can also choose to read from Booktrack’s library of classic stories that are already paired with soundtracks—making “older” stories more exciting.
Technology makes it easier to engage and excite all readers in your classroom, helping them develop a life-long love of reading.
Jessica Sanders is the Director of Social Outreach for Whooo’s Reading, a San Diego-based education organization that motivates students to read more every day. It’s available to teachers, schools and districts. Jessica grew up reading books like The Giver and Holes, and is passionate about making reading as exciting for young kids today as it has always been for her. Follow Learn2Earn on Twitter and Facebook, and check out their new ebook, How to Bring Technology Into the Classroom, just $2.99 on Amazon.com.
