Reading Strategies

for the Digital Age

BELLINGHAM TECHNICAL COLLEGE FACULTY LEARNING COMMUNITY

Presenters:Dawn HawleyJudi WiseTraci TaylorStoo Sepp

WA State Digital Literacy Library

Grant

Reading Apprenticeship

Initiatives

Student Support

Self Help

LibraryInstruction

eLearning

Who we are:We are a Faculty Learning Community from Bellingham Technical College with a shared interest in online reading and comprehension.

What we are doing:We are exploring online reading strategies, tools and best practices as teachers, librarians and eLearning staff.

Our Project Research

Questions

1. How does reading digital text differ from reading traditional hard copy text?

2. What are the differences in reading hard copy text, static digital text, and hypertexts?

3. What are the best practices for reading digital texts?

4. What modifications can we make to our courses, workshops and trainings that are online, hybrid and web enhanced in regards to reading?

Our Activities

● Student Surveys & Focus Groups

● Words Onscreen: the Fate of

Reading in a Digital World

● Other Research & Bibliography

Cover of “Words Onscreen” used with permission of author.

Surveys & Focus Groups

To gain insight into students’ preferences, strategies,

strengths, and challenges with reading all texts

Focus group findings

"Focus Group Word Cloud" by BTC FLC, Bellingham Technical College Faculty Learning

Community Reading in the Digital Age is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

Our Themes, Distilled

Common themes that have emerged from our research so far…

● Environments for digital texts are different than for print text

● Academic or deep reading online presents unique challenges

● Reading comprehension requires different strategies online

● Distraction is an issue for online readers

● Quality & credibility of online material is harder to determine

● The physicality of printed text is still important for many readers

● Students struggle with how to annotate & take notes digitally

● Device and internet availability is an issue

"Distilling at MBD" by Mount Baker Distillery is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

Findings & Applications

1.For Teachers…

2.For Librarians…

3.For eLearning...

Instruction: Question

How do you teach reading for

your discipline?

(Please type your answer in the chat window)

Instruction

Develop an overall approach to reading onscreen

texts:

● Build curriculum Around Reading Apprenticeship

Dimensions--Personal, Social, Cognitive,

Knowledge-building, Metacognition

● Make It Personal

● Make It Social

● Surface Mental Process

● Make it Known

Link: http://www.losmedanos.edu/deved/documents/RA-2pg.pdf

Instruction

Model to students how find purpose for reading.

If students know their purpose,

they can adjust their behavior

and reading time.

Instruction

Help students to cut out the clutter (Remove

distractions)

Teach specific approaches to reading on the Internet

Example: Colorado State University

Link: http://writing.colostate.edu/guides/page.cfm?pageid=651&guideid=33

Instruction

Help students construct a reading path for nonlinear

textual environments.

● Assessing the credibility of sources

● Reducing to manageable number of texts

● Determining relevance of texts to goals

(Cho & Afflerbach, 2015)

Instruction

Provide a checklist for developing strategic

Internet strategies.

Explore and select Web sources

Interconnect and learn from multiple

sources

Evaluate and critique Web sources

Monitor and adjust your Internet reading.

(Cho & Afflerbach, 2015)

Instruction

Use Internet Reciprocal Teaching (Hodgson, 2015):

“Scaffolded Inquiry”

1. Teacher-led Modeling

2. Collaborative modeling

3. Inquiry

Instruction

Engage in and encourage mindful practices:

● “Form follows function”

● Quiet and Sustained

● Out of Site(sight) out of Mind

● Honor thy printed text and author

● Offer activities that honor deep reading to counterbalance

the trend in “short reading” online.

● At what cost?

● It’s all about the learning

(Baron, 2015)

Library

1. What can we as librarians do to improve student

online reading skills and comprehension?

2. How do we connect what we have learned with

what we already do?

RESEARCH QUESTIONS

How do you think academic

libraries can help students

navigate the challenges of

reading online?

(Please type your answer in the chat window)

Library: Question

Library: Teaching

● Collaborate with faculty to design targeted instruction

that addresses student barriers to online reading

● Offer more advanced searching & digital resource

evaluation instruction to improve student resource

selection skills

● Introduce note-taking and annotation strategies for

reading digital material

● Help students learn to be mindful when setting up their

physical & digital environments to decrease distraction &

increase self-confidence in reading online

Library: Resources & Access

● Circulation: Acquire & check out equipment that supports

online reading

● Collection Development: Consider interface & ease of use

for new material, in addition to subject and content

appropriateness

● Access: Provide mobile hotspots, as well as print and digital

copies of texts

● Collaboration: Work with campus bookstore to provide print

and digital textbook options & to ensure the accessibility of

OER

Library: Tutorials & Tools

Develop tutorials for digital reading strategies & tools

Explore best practices & innovations for developing

online reading skills

Investigate new digital annotation tools that increase

online reading comprehension

Introduce software apps to remove distractions from

digital text

eLearning: Question

What do you do (if anything)

to make reading online easier

for yourself?

(Please type your answer in the chat window)

eLearning: Clean Reading

Browser:

Apps:

Managing:

Evernote Clearly, Reading

List (safari), Print Mode

Readability, Instapaper,

Paper

Send-to, Share-to, Email (works with the above apps)

eLearning: Annotating

Apps:

Research:

Adobe Acrobat, Notability,

and many, many, more

Papers (mac, iOS), Endnote

eLearning: Learning Design

Canvas

Keep it simple

No crazy colors

Use headings, spacing.

Documents (docx, pdf, etc) or

canvas pages?

Can content be annotated?

eTextbooks

/ Materials

Portable / Sharable ?

Can they be annotated?

Summary of Ideas

The ‘thing’ being read and the purpose for

reading it will dictate strategies.

● Academic or deep reading online presents challenges

● Reading comprehension requires different strategies

● Distraction is an issue

● Annotation and NoteTaking

● Quality & credibility of material is harder to determine

● The physicality of printed text is still important for many

readers

● Access Issues: Digital v. Print

teaching.btc.ctc.edu/readingonline

Slides

Survey Results

References

Thank you

Bellingham Technical College Learning Community Project Members

● Judi Wise, Basic Academic Skills/ESL Faculty● Traci Taylor, Librarian ● Dawn Hawley, eLearning Instructional Technician/Library

Specialist ● Stoo Sepp, Director of eLearning● Caren Kongshaug, English/Basic Skills/RA Lead● Jane Blume, Director, Library & Media Services

teaching.btc.ctc.edu/readingonline