- Are students really interested in and willing to use the Internet?
- Do teachers really know how to use this new technology to improve their instruction and their students' learning?
- Will students really benefit from incorporating the Internet, especially the World Wide Web, into their school day?
The answer to question 1 is obvious: Of course our students are interested in, and eager to get on, the Web. And why not? The World Wide Web is the exciting part of the Internet with its point-and-click hyperlinks, its sounds, its colorful images, and its animated graphics. Kids love the Web.
Question 2 has a less clear answer: Some teachers surely are comfortable with the Web; they know how it works, and they can see where and how it fits into their curriculum. Other teachers (a clear majority) are not yet sure (or perhaps not even interested in) how they can use this new tool.
Question 3 raises the hidden nature of the Web: For all the technology's bells and whistles, most of the information on a Web site arrives at a student's computer in the form of text—that is, words, sentences, and paragraphs.
Raise your hand if you have students in your class, building, or district who struggle with reading words, sentences, and paragraphs. Keep your hand up if the number of students with reading comprehension difficulties is increasing each year.
The World Wide Web offers educators a powerful opportunity for teaching students how to read better. Owing to student interest in—even fascination with—the Web, we have their attention. But instead of accepting the typical student visit to a Web site—click, look, click, listen, click, move on to another Web site—we can teach our students how to read the Web, or "site read." The high expense of an Internet hookup can be worth the money.
Reading Is Paramount
Reading comprehension continues to be a key goal of our schools. New technologies have not diminished our students' need to read. In fact, the arrival of computers and the Internet has increased the importance of reading comprehension, as all districts know.
- recognize, pronounce, and know the meaning of words in texts;
- use a variety of reading strategies to increase comprehension and learning;
- demonstrate literal, inferential, and evaluative comprehension of a variety of printed materials;
- connect reading selections to other texts, experiences, issues, and events;
- read for enjoyment and information; and
- read a variety of literary forms of varying complexity from a variety of time periods.
Reading for Understanding
When comprehension broke down in my 6th grade literature and writing class, I knew that I needed to alter my game plan. Until my students reached a problematic passage in Lupita Mañana (Beatty, 1981), everything had been going along very well. The students had been tracking their comprehension by a minitask: creating electronic graphic organizers on computers to "map, cluster, or web" the plot's development—problems facing the characters and their solutions to the problems that, in turn, caused new problems (Lewin & Shoemaker, 1998).
The breakdown occurred in Chapter 12 when the author wrote,
Friday of that week fell on All Souls' Day, November 2. An important holiday in Mexico, it was the day when the family dead returned to their homes. (P. 149)
Not one of my students had sufficient background knowledge of Mexico's important holiday Día de los Muertos (The Day of the Dead) to comprehend the paragraph. And this lack had a negative effect on the entire chapter. They thought that this holiday was "stupid" and "weird," so their attitude toward the whole book suffered.
I had to change my lesson plan and supply the necessary background knowledge. The Web came to my rescue; I sent all my students on a virtual field trip to Mexico, Guatemala, and Columbia to experience this holiday. I located three excellent sites in these countries that presented information in English on this holiday to bolster a better appreciation of another culture.
But would my students actually read and understand the information provided by the Web sites? That is, could they meet the first trait (sometimes called a rubric) on my state's Reading and Literature Performance Assessment (Oregon Department of Education, 1997)? Some would; some might; some had very little chance—the reality of reading in any classroom. I created a reading comprehension device to assist them: the electronic worksheet, or E-sheet for short (fig. 1). The E-sheet helped the kids focus on reading comprehension because they had to answer a set of guided questions that I supplied on their floppy disks. As they read the information at the three Web sites, they toggled to the word processor to type in answers. Back and forth, from the Web to the E-sheet, reading and writing. And not one kid complained. They actually liked it.
Figure 1. Guided Reading: “E-Sheet”
Día de los Muertos
Site #1: KIDPROJ All Soul's Day
http://www.kidlink.org/KIDPROJ/MCC/11.1.2.html
EXTRA CREDIT
Who wrote this entry?
What country is she from?
How do they celebrate this holiday?
What does “fiambre” mean?
What are some other holidays celebrated there? (HINT: click on “country” button.)
Site #2: The Day of the Dead
http://www.dayofthedead.com
EXTRA CREDIT
Who wrote this entry?
Find her picture. What is your estimate of her age?
What other pictures do you find?
___
___
___
Click on Chapter Three of her book: What photograph do you see?
Copy and paste the photograph here:
Reading for Deeper Meaning
E-sheets are great for forcing careful reading, but they mainly assist the first trait of reading comprehension: a competent understanding of the selection. Oregon's state learning standard requires a second trait—a deeper level of understanding in which students extend beyond the text by relating what is being read to some other source or experience. This mandate challenges most students. It requires synthesizing the author's information with additional information from another source: book, article, Web site, movie, TV show, or personal experience. They must connect other information to the assigned reading.
For example, my 8th grade language arts/U.S. history class was studying the Boston Massacre of 1770. They read for comprehension from their history textbook. But when I asked them to connect the textbook's account of this historical event to some other source, they sank. They had no prior source of information. So, I went to the Web. How many Web sites do you think exist on the topic of the Boston Massacre?
Plenty, including the excellent "From Revolution to Reconstruction" created by George Welling at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands (http://odur.let.rug.nl/~usa/). He has posted hundreds of primary source documents on U.S. history. I assigned my 8th graders to read two: an account by Captain Thomas Preston, the British commanding officer, and an anonymous eyewitness account from a Bostonian. Not surprisingly, these accounts reflect two widely different points of view. I expected the students not only to read each account for understanding, but also to compare and contrast them.
The good news is that the Web provided my students with excellent resources to increase their understanding of this important topic in U.S. history, resources that I would not have had time to search for in my school's library, the public library, or the university library. And that's the beauty of the Web: It brings resources right into the school for our students, so we don't have to go out and get them.
Now the bad news: Take a look at the document from the Web site on Captain Preston's testimony to court (fig. 2) How many of your students might have a bit of difficulty reading and understanding it? The long paragraph, the tough vocabulary, and the small print will challenge student historians' ability to comprehend the important information that the Captain is providing.
Figure 2. Web Site with Original Document
- perfect Web sites for what we are studying;
- other Web sites that are fine but have nothing to do with what we're studying; and
- sick Web sites created by nut cases (racist, sexist, violent, pornographic) that we will have nothing to do with—a tiny minority.
Actually, a fourth category exists: Web sites perfect for what we're studying, but written in a way that is difficult to comprehend. For example, a person may create a fine Web site on a topic we are studying, but doesn't have us—students and teachers—in mind. The vocabulary may be challenging or the format may be confusing. Perhaps the information comes in huge paragraphs or, as in the Boston Massacre example, is written as testimony from more than 200 years ago.
- At the Web site, use the cursor to highlight the words you want.
- Select copy.
- Go to your word processor program.
- Select new document.
- Select paste.
Figure 3
Of course, a clever teacher would eventually assign students to work in pairs to create their own reformatted versions of a Web site. Young Web users would need to read for deeper meaning: To rewrite and reformat information, students must truly understand it.
Critiquing an Author
The third reading trait on Oregon's reading and literature scoring guide is "reading critically for content analysis," which asks young readers to "take a critical stance, standing apart from the text, to make supported judgments." Their response could include "suggesting more than one interpretation, challenging the author's assumptions, or providing feedback to the author on what could have been included, omitted, or changed" (Oregon Department of Education, 1997).
Pretty tough, yes? How does a teacher move young readers to this demanding level? I do it by deputizing the Web.
For example, early in the school year, my 8th grade students studied colonial American history, namely, the arrival of English colonists in North America and their impact on Native Americans. We focused on the Powhatan Nation and on Jamestown Colony, which are famous, in part, because of Pocahontas and Captain John Smith. As part of my instruction about this key historical event, my class compared and contrasted the Disney animated film Pocahontas with the accounts in our textbook; with primary source documents; and with a biography of Pocahontas, The Double Life of Pocahontas (Fritz, 1983).
Additionally, I directed the students to two Web sites for further information: the Walt Disney Studios site (http://www.disney.com/DisneyBooks/new/poca/story/Pocahontas_1.html) to read some background information and the Powhatan Renape Nation site to read Chief Roy Crazy Horse's open letter criticizing the Disney version of Pocahontas (http://www.powhatan.org/pocc.html). Naturally, I expected my students to be keen readers of the content information and to be skillful comparers of multiple sources.
I also wanted them to become critical analyzers of the texts, so they composed letters about their reactions to the Disney version and to Chief Roy Crazy Horse's opinion—that is, they "suggested more than one interpretation, challenged the author's assumptions, and/or provided feedback to the author on what could have been included, omitted, or changed," as the state curriculum mandate requires (Oregon Department of Education, 1997, p. 9). These persuasive letters served as a culminating performance task that I used to measure my students' understandings of this topic (Lewin & Shoemaker, 1998).
And because my school has Internet access, the students were able to e-mail their letters of critique to Disney in California and the Powhatan Renape Nation in New Jersey—a nice use of the new technology.
My goal as an educator is to improve my students' academic performance. And no academic skill is more important than reading. I'll use any resource that assists me in this important endeavor. The World Wide Web is one such resource. Its engaging appeal to students at all grade levels and of varying abilities allows me to harness this new technology to teach my students "site reading" and to improve their reading performance.
