Connected Reading - Who, What, Where, and How We Read

A few quick questions: how are you reading this post? Are you on a computer? A phone? Did you find the post in a Facebook stream? A Twitter feed? Did a friend suggest it? When you're done, what will you do with the post? Hit 'like' in a social media stream? Share the post? 

Another quick question: in what ways might the reading in your classroom relate to the reading that you're doing right now?

Through their work with Connected Reading, Turner & Hicks (2015) look at the relationship between current reading practices and classroom instruction. Through interviews with youth, they found that the three practices of Connected Reading are encountering a text by receiving, surfing, stumbling, or searching; engaging with a text by deciding, curating, reading, and sharing; and, evaluating a text by determining value, judging, employing digital tools, and managing distraction. 

Here are three ideas for exploring Connected Reading in your classroom:

1. Encountering: Establish an online system for book selection for independent reading projects. Having students select books from a class blog, class booktalk channel, or class Goodreads account are all ways to help students be thoughtful in the ways they encounter new texts. (Bonus: when students create content for the class blog, booktalk channel, or Goodreads account, they're engaging and evaluating texts already)
2. Engaging: The next time you're talking about how to annotate a book, try taking a photo of a page of a book and posting the photo in Google Drawings. If you make the photo public, then the class can annotate together. If that's too chaotic, you can assign different pages to groups of 2-3 students. Those students can take the photo, share the document with each other, annotate their reading, and then share out with the class (idea from here). 
3. Evaluating: Managing distractions can be incredibly hard for readers, especially when reading on a digital platform. Consider having your students research how they manage distractions by having them observe how they read, noting how many times they jump between tabs, apps, and programs. Then, try doing same activity using one of the slew of apps geared toward distraction-blocking (3 possibilities: Freedom, Self-control, Focus Me).  Students can evaluate the ways they manage distractions independently, the effectiveness of using apps, and establish methods for themselves of ways to manage distractions while reading.

Turner, K. H., & Hicks, T. (2015). Connected reading: Teaching adolescent readers in a digital world. Urbana, IL: NCTE.