The net is a wide and endless source of texts, articles and authentic written material. Use it at your own advantage! 😉
Do you remember the gearwheel graph (link) and the need for implementing digital resources and technologies into teaching? First, you should use your digital competences to effectively identify and select the resources you need. Then, in accordance with your learning objectives, you should modify and/or apply them incorporating digital technologies. In our case, reading objectives which can be divided into text comprehension, vocabulary and phonemic awareness.
In our Ed Tools KIT, you will find a complete list of educational tools you can use for your lessons according to the reading skill(s) you wish to focus on with your students.
VOCABULARY and TEXT COMPREHENSION
Once selected your resource, you can either modify or create from scratch fun, engaging and visually captivating vocabulary and text comprehension activities based on gamification (link). Examples of these are quizzes, multiple-choice questions, but also matching or drag & drop activities. Some tools even allow you to modify the resource itself adding extra written, audio or visual explanations.
Alternatively, if you are working on a LMS (link to glossary), you can use the tools available inside the platform to create the desired activities. However, these tools may be more static or less open modifications, for example in the creation of more engaging and colourful layouts.
SYNCHRONOUS OR ASYNCHRONOUS?
That is the question! These tools allow you to create activities and personalize resources which could either be shared to LMSs as asynchronous material or used synchronously in your live sessions (you can, for instance, embed them in your PowerPoint presentations or share them directly online with your students).
PHONEMIC AWARENESS
Reading includes working on words’ pronunciation and sentences’ rhythm and intonation, that is promoting phonemic awareness.
SYNCHRONOUS OR ASYNCHRONOUS? That is the question!
These skills can be trained both asynchronously (link) and synchronously (link).
Asynchronously: identify the most challenging words to pronounce and insert audio files with the words’ pronunciation. If focusing on sentences’ rhythm and intonation, you can alternatively insert the audio description of the entire passage/ text broken down into paragraphs (one audio file per paragraph). STUDENTS PRODUCTION: device tasks in which students are asked to record themselves reusing the words/sentences/ expressions encountered or reading the text aloud.
Synchronously: see Lesson 3 “promoting speaking and listening skills”