The Power of Online Social Reading
I’m an avid reader, but I’ve never been the type to join book groups or reading clubs. It always seemed like a lot of pressure…pressure to read the book by a certain time or pressure to think a certain way about the metaphors or the characters or the themes.
As a result, my first real experience with social reading was when I used the Kindle app for the first time and was able to see the highlights of other people who had read the same book I was reading. At first I looked askance at the whole process, as reading had almost always been an experience I shared only with the author and the characters. But as I looked at the highlight counts and the number of people who saw what I saw or felt what I felt in those pages, I came to understand the potential power of the shared reading experience.
Fast forward a few years to a loose cohort of fellow leaders and teachers in my own school district. After using a district-specific hashtag (#spamtownedchat) for a couple of months in order to better connect within our district, we decided to conduct a summer book-study over Twitter. My immediate thought: “This is perfect for me…I don’t have to sit in a room within anyone when we talk about this book.” (Don’t judge me…I’m an introvert and need processing time!) My next thought: “How many of students feel the same way I do?”
The online social community that our students live in is one many adults don’t understand. It’s a world of snippets and snaps, likes and emojis. Can you really come to a full understanding of a topic when you can’t focus on it for ten straight minutes without having to do something else? Actually, I think you can. If that something else means taking a picture of annotations and tweeting it out, responding with a comment or a poll, or sharing a link or infographic. The more I immerse myself in the online social community, the more I find myself wanting to do these things when I’m reading — to make connections and respond with others. Our students probably do too.
Twitter is just one online tool that offers social reading opportunities, but it can be a little intimidating to start out in an environment that seems so wide open and global. For teachers who want to engage their students in organized online social reading, one of the best places to start could be using the discussion forums in their school’s chosen LMS to conduct virtual literature circles or reading groups.
There are also dedicated classroom apps that encourage social and interactive reading — three that I’ve tried include Actively Learn, DocentEDU, and Subtext. With tools like these students can directly interact with the text and with classmates, which can really up the engagement factor. Encouraging students to write reviews for @goodreads or Amazon, or read and/or write online fiction, is encouraging them to reflect and respond and interact with the online community. All of these skills are an important part of developing deep readers of and responders to information.
We owe it to our students to provide opportunities to read in ways that fit their world…not a world of popcorn read and response in class or oral book reports at the end of the quarter. Social communities of all types are flourishing, and our students can benefit from the power of those that can engage them in reading.
