My Digital Reading Practices, Part 1

Last week, I began blogging about my thoughts on digital reading. At the encouragement of my co-author, Kristen Turner, I’m going to work over the next few weeks to document some of my own digital reading practices as we begin to draft the book. I will be visiting classrooms, surveying students, and interviewing teachers as well as some randomly selected students during those visits. Still, along with getting data about what students and teachers are doing, Kristen and I both agree that it’s important to reflect on our own practices with digital reading.

So, this first entry about my digital reading practices essentially takes the tried and true method of highlighting and annotating the text and updates it with some digital tools. I don’t think that there is anything truly revolutionary about this except for the fact that I can annotate text easily and share it socially, which may be where the important elements of this could really come into play. For this kind of digital annotation, I can recommend two tools, although there are a variety of them out there.

Crocodoc Screen Shot
Crocodoc Screen Shot

To annotate existing documents, especially PDFs, and share them with others, I have used Crocodoc. With the same basic highlighting tools as the Preview program built into my Mac’s OS, I can highlight using different colors and insert comments as either point comments (like dropping a pin), area comments (as shown with the red square) or text comments (by highlighting a certain section of text that I want to comment on). I can then share or download the PDF with annotations. I could see a teacher using this as an option for students to mark up the text as a means of showing close reading. Certainly, students could also take a screen capture of pages from an e-book or even take a photograph of an actual book and then annotate it in a similar manner.

The other tool, Diigo, allows for the same type of highlighting, commenting, and sharing that is more suited for webpages. As a social bookmark service, teachers can create an RSS list of readings for their students, as well as groups where students can comments and highlight as well as see the annotations of others. One other benefit of using Diigo it is that it will archive a snapshot of the webpage the moment that you visited, so even if it changes later you will still have a record of the original text.

Given the number of edubloggers who have already used and documented their experiences with both of these tools — as well as many other tools such as Evernote —  a recognize that I’m not shaking the world by sharing these particular digital reading practices. What I would say though is that we, as teachers, need to be quite intentional in the way we introduce these tools outlined in the pedagogical goals. There are a number of smart books on comprehension strategies that have emerged over the past 20 years, and I can see that in digital tools like Crocodoc and Diigo, coupled with strategic instruction, could help make a difference for our students.

There will be more parts in this series of posts about my own digital reading practices, and I’m just not quite sure how many yet. As always, your thoughts about this topic are most welcome and I look forward to learning more about how others are using digital reading tools to support student learning.

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4 thoughts on “My Digital Reading Practices, Part 1”

  1. I’m thinking about before, during, and post reading strategies. Digital annotation is a during reading strategy. How do you find texts worthy of annotating? How do you decide that you want to annotate (vs. read and file, read and discard, read and send to your colleague’s inbox – or perhaps send without reading….). 🙂

  2. The information you provided is and can be quite useful for teachers and students. The features that you described for both Crocodoc and Diigo are awesome, and I do not know which digital annotation I would utilize. Thus far the only tool that I have used that is similar to the digital annotation is the tracking feature on Microsoft Word. How much does these programs cost?

  3. Thanks, Kristen. A topic worthy of another post, for sure.

    Thanks, too, N. Crockett, for asking. The personal account for Crocodoc is free, although there is also pricing for organizational uses (https://personal.crocodoc.com/signup/). Diigo, too, has a similar approach: “Diigo is supported by a freemium business model, with the paid subscription by users being the primary revenue source.” (https://www.diigo.com/about). So, I think that you can sign up and use both for free… that is how I have my account set up.

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