Reading Tool: Reading Rockets

 

    Reading Rockets (https://www.readingrockets.org/)  is a nationwide multimedia initiative that provides a multitude of research-based reading techniques, lessons, and activities to assist young children in learning to read and improving their reading skills. The website's reading materials help parents, teachers, and other educators help struggling readers improve their fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension.

        It has an option as "Teaching Reading" and you can find many detailed options including classroom strategies, which might be helpful for novice teachers. Also, reading courses come as modules and each module focuses on a different feature of teaching reading such as fluency, vocabulary, spelling, assessment etc. 

    There are many reading topics that can help teachers to find information and assistance and the topics come with videos.

Reading Tool: Archive of Our Own (Ao3)

 

Ao3 is a website that allows users to share their creativity and read what others have written. Ao3 is actually a fanfiction sharing website, which might make it seem inadequate for classroom use to some people, but Ao3's contents and tagging system allows readers to be autonomous in their reading and learning. 

Ao3's unique tagging system allows readers to filter out what they want to or do not want to see. Readers are able to search for works that align with their interests, so they have the freedom to choose from the thousands of works Ao3 has to offer. Readers are able to select if they would perefr a light reading or not, or if they want to they can choose the language level, altough it is not very adequate. If the reader accidentally stumbles upon a work that is NSFW, the website warns them asks the reader if they wish to proceed before showing the content. This allows the readers who did not exclude the necessery tags to avoid encountering unwanted content. 

Ao3 is made by fans for fans, so the content and the grammar are not regulated or checked for errors. There is also a chance that the author of the work does not tag their work properly, so the reader might stumble upon a work that is harder for them to read based on their level. To become an author, one must be sent a digital invitation by another author, so not everyone can share their work.

In conclusion, while Ao3 can be inadequate at times, the fact that it allows readers to engage in their interests while reading in English outweighs that. 

Reading Tool: Quill Reading for Evidence

    Quill Reading for Evidence is a tool that supports students in building both language and reading skills. Having activities called "Reading for Evidence" the students read a text and then writes answers to open-ended questions based on their understanding of that text.

The official website of Quill Reading for Evidence

The presentation of the feedback process from the main page

    Below, we see an example of Reading for Evidence. On the right is the text and on the left is question with its answer box. The student reads, writes his/her answer and then clicks "get feedback". A Feedback Bot (an AI bot) automatically evaluates student responses. It serves custom feedback—per prompt—to coach students to strengthen their writing and better represent evidence from the text. Designed for students in 8th-12th grade, each activity takes 15-20 minutes to complete.

An example of a text and its answering process.

Feedback from Quill. It continues to give feedback until the student does the required thing.

    While the students work with Quill, the teacher can assign students the reading texts, as well as see their process. Seeing their process helps the teacher see what the students are missing and help them fix the problem.

Authority of the teacher pt.1

Authority of the teacher pt. 2