Can't Get Kids to Read? Make It Social

In his March "Digitally Speaking" column, Bill Ferriter articulates a common classroom concern, "How can we possibly teach reading when our kids just won't read?"

Though troubling, it's not surprising that students aren't into reading on the terms generally set by schools. Schools are one of the only text-driven environments the Net Generation experiences; their world is far more tuned to collaborative learning and social media. So, Ferriter says, schools can bring students back to deeper reading by making it social and blurring the line between fun and work. These ideas will sound familiar to anyone at Don Tapscott’s ASCD Annual Conference general session.

Diigo is one of the tools Ferriter uses in his classroom to make reading social. It allows teachers to create secure groups where students can bookmark, highlight, and annotate any online text. Before diving into Diigo, the class establishes communication norms, discusses differences between digital and face-to-face conversations, and determines strong and weak examples of annotation. Ferriter also defines five specific roles for students working in shared annotation groups.

Social reading has not only brought Ferriter’s students back to deep engagement with text, but it's also broken learning out of the classtime box. His students read and annotate text at all hours of the day; they want to follow and contribute to the developing conversations among their peers.