Elisa Balbuena - ILA Newsletter Weekly Project: Effective Literacy Website #4

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Elisa Balbuena

ILA Newsletter Weekly Project: Effective Literacy Website #4

            Actively Learn (https://www.activelylearn.com) is a literacy website that encourages students to stop skimming and start learning. The website has over 3,000 texts that include, but are not limited to, high-interest articles, poems and short stories, data sets and assessments, and even textbook sections. It offers support for building literacy skills and learning in English language arts, science, and social studies. It is part of the Achieve3000 suite of educational technology tools.

            Actively Learn was founded by Dr. Deep Sran and Jay Goyal in 2012. Together, they pooled their wealth of experience and knowledge to target an area of education that they felt was not actively focused on: a student’s ability to think critically and reason about complex questions while learning actively through reading. After piloting a prototype in the school that Dr. Sran founded, they found that students performed 23% better on post-reading comprehension tests.

            The Actively Learn platform contains a digital library with content appropriate for students in grades 3-12. The content is organized by curriculum unit, genre, theme, grade level, and Lexile levels, making searching for materials a breeze. As a teacher, it is very easy to assign work to students. Actively Learn integrates with many Course or Learning Management Systems, namely Google Classroom, Clever, Edmodo, Canvas, and Schoology. With Google Classroom and Clever, specifically, integration is made even easier as teachers can sync their already existing classes to Actively Learn to start students working immediately. 

Each text on Actively Learn has comprehension or engagement questions sprinkled throughout, and teachers can add in their own questions to the texts if needed. There are also built-in notes for the students to look at while they read, and just like the comprehension or engagement questions, teachers can add in additional notes if they need students to look at something specific. There is a teacher dashboard where they can monitor the progress of their students, and they are even able to grade and provide feedback to students in real-time as they are completing a reading. This feature is great, especially for students who are reluctant to talk out loud during discussions. If there is a resource that is not available through the platform, teachers can upload it for their students to work with.

            On the student side, Actively Learn has many accessibility features built into the program. Like teachers, students can add notes to their reading, which helps them practice annotation skills. Additionally, if they are working collaboratively with other students on a text, they can tag their classmates in the notes to call their attention to something specific. They can also tag the teacher in the notes if they have questions about the text. Students can highlight difficult words and Actively Learn gives them the option to pull up a definition. For ESL students or English Language Learners, Actively Learn also gives an option to translate a highlighted word into another language. Finally, for students with learning disabilities or those who would rather hear the text, Actively Learn provides a narrate option when whole sentences are highlighted.

            Actively Learn is a website that provides high-interest texts and other materials that help build literacy skills in English language arts, science, and social studies. The resources are very flexible and easy to implement, and the platform’s integration with various other Course and Learning Management Systems makes it appealing to many teachers. This, in combination with the many accessibility features that the platform makes available to students, makes Actively Learn a great literacy website to use in the classroom.

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