Virtual Notebook for Independent Reading

 

I value independent reading as a literacy tool within the classroom. I believe since we have entered a digital world, it is rare to see a student enjoying a good book. I want to encourage my students to be more independent readers. I believe that reading increases curiosity, literacy, and critical thinking. However, I have come to learn that encouraging my students to read have become a challenge. They will do it for the grade but through their reflections, I can see there is not much though being put into the reflections. Also, once they write a reflect and get the grade there is no building on the information, adding to the issue of critical thought being a lacking factor. I have noticed however, they will prefer low stake google form reflections over paper reflections. They spend more time thinking and clicking through. It also helps them with the idea that these metacognitive reflections are only intended to capture a quick snap of their thinking. It is only meant to be a recording of your thoughts, which can then expand further into critical thinking. So, I began to wonder, how can I turn these metacognitive records and make them more esstential, so eventually they can increase the level of critical thought. I discovered this Google Extension that allows for Google forms to become a list of organized responses in a Google document. I believe this could be a wonderful tool that can be introduced in phases to my students. They can begin with independent reflections to practice metacognitve thinking and since it is a Google doc, eventually this virtual notebook can become much more collaborative through activities. My goal is that if I can help my students become critical thinkers with their reading, they will want to read more. Creating this to be functional is now the challenge.

More information on meta-cognitive thinking. my students are able to highlight a quote in the text and then use their thinking stems "I think... I wonder.... I notice... and This connects to..." to make a record of their mental conversation with the text. I use this strategy with my MLL students as well. They can use their stems in Spanish as the primary focus is for them to learn critical thinking and literacy not the language. It requires a lot of modeling and repetition in practice, but eventually they learn to record very interesting and powerful annotations as they go through various texts.