THE DIGITAL READING DIARY IS AN ESSENTIAL TOOL FOR THE MODERN CLASSROOM
I have to share one of the best teaching resources we at literacyideas.com have encountered in a long time. It is a ca n’t-miss from our perspective.
This Digital Reading Diary will save you and your students a world of frustration and time when collecting data and evidence about reading at home.
It’s perfect for remote learning and works brilliantly alongside platforms such as Google Classroom, SeeSaw and Microsoft Teams.
Home reading diaries have traditionally been almost a punitive process for students and parents to manage at home. The notion of simply capturing a number of pages read alongside a parent has no educational merit, providing almost no insight as to what challenged and captured student attention while reading.
Furthermore, to add insult to injury, you (the teacher) continue this pointless process in the classroom by chasing up diaries to see who has or hasn’t read recently. What are we teaching and learning here?
In the digital era, collecting reading data could and should be much simpler, provide in-depth assessment for students about what they read, and build a meaningful profile of insights, challenges and further learning opportunities that arose from it.
“Never collect a reading diary or log again” is the promise associated with the Digital Reading Log, and I can verify this is true. It also offers so much more potential for you as an assessment tool than chasing reading diaries regularly. I will never go back..
It took me about 15 minutes to set this up for my class for the year, and now I log into my computer for a detailed analysis of my students reading habits… That’s it. I’m sorted for the year…
I get crucial information about aspects of reading that challenge my students and data I can use to guide future English lessons, and my data collection for reports on reading is all here in one place waiting for me.
The feature I love most about this resource is how it adapts depending on the genre of the book being read. Non-Fiction and Fiction books are entirely different reading experiences and require their own set of questions about how they were read and what was learned from them.
Even though this resource will set you back a few dollars ( I paid $8.00 USD ), this lifelong tool will save you hours of conflict and provide a wealth of reading data for years. Furthermore, you can customize any aspect to suit your students’ needs.
DIGITAL READING LOGS ARE THE FUTURE OF HOMEWORK
Check out the link and the video for yourself. It cost me the same as a couple of cups of coffee, but I would pay double in a heartbeat to have done this earlier in my career.
Check it out here for yourself, and if you have used this or something similar, we’d love to hear about it.