Interactive Storybooks

This article presents how to create and how to use electronic books in the classroom. Electronic books are great resources for all students, especially students with reading difficulties and English Language Learners. These electronic books can easily be created in a program like Power Point. After reading a story, students retell the story and teachers put text, pictures, and animation on each slide. They then put a voice that reads the story on each slide as well. Students can play these books during reading time and it helps reinforce the story they read in their own words. They can track print, without having to turn pages, and receive additional scaffolding while reading the story.

This article helped me to make my interactive storybook for this class. I liked the suggestions it gave and the quick tutorial on how to create your own. I would like to learn more about actually recording my voice to read the story aloud. I do think that this article made it seem like creating these storybooks is less time consuming than it actually is. I spent quite a bit of time working with powerpoint, choosing the right graphics and animations to create my storybook. I would like to know more about how to adapt this practice to use with middle school students. I think it would be extremely time consuming to create these books for young adult novels. I think it would be fun though for middle school students to create these books for younger students in the school building! 

Citation for article used: Rhodes. J. & Milby, T. (2007). Teacher-Created Electronic books: Integrating Technology to Support Readers with Disabilities. The Reading Teacher,  61(3), 255-259. Retrieved July 14,2008, from Education Research Complete database.

Lights, cameras, pencils! Using descriptive video to enhance writing!

This article Demonstrates the uses of descriptive videos in the classroom to improve literacy skills. Descriptive videos are originally created for those with visual impairments, can be used by teachers to introduce students to content area vocabulary and foster comprehension. Descriptive videos identify key vocabulary words that normally are not introduced in the video, and offer students a rich description of the setting and actions taking place. Students take this description information presented and transfer it into their writing. This technique can be used with students of all ages and ability levels.

I would love to teach middle school science and I think that this technique would be very helpful. Using a video will motivate middle school students and the descriptive feature would introduce students to vocabulary words in context.  Using vocabulary words introduced by the description, students can write about what they watched and have accurate and precise terminology.

Citation for this article:

Hoffner, H., Baker, E. & Quinn, K.B. (2008). Lights, cameras, pencils! Using 
     descriptive video to enhance writing Reading Teacher, 61(7), 576-579.