One more week. One more week in which we at Write Any Papers all wonder what to do to hook our students, how to take advantage of this uncertain and suffocating time to learn more, to learn together, to learn meaningfully. In this short text, I will try to offer a viable and motivating proposal based on reflections on what it is to read and understand in the digital age.
We surely share that reading comprehension is at the base of all learning, educational research corroborates this. But teaching understanding requires personal involvement requires that our students want to understand, feel motivated to get involved in reading, that is, they must have reasons to read.
Isn't it true that most of the learning that we carry out in life is aimed at solving something? Similarly, we should read and write to solve problems in real life. We consult a website to find information about that topic that we want to be interested in or to find that trip that we will do when we can move freely, we read the leaflet of a drug to know its side effects, we write in a forum to give our opinion, we examine the evaluations of a product before buying it or we spend a wonderful afternoon accompanied by a novel. We all read and write for specific purposes, for purposes that have to do with personal goals and social activity.
At school, we try to develop skills in our students that they will need at this time and throughout life. Because children are not in school just to prepare for their future, they are to live their present. How can we develop reading comprehension, written production, and oral communication in this time of confinement?
What powerful proposal could we make? How could we work the competence in linguistic communication in a way that makes sense for our students? How to do it with other colleagues even from different educational stages? How to include content from different subjects?
In these moments of uncertainty due to the coronavirus pandemic, our students of all ages feel restless and interested in knowing. In addition, we can take advantage of the fact that 2020 has been declared the Ibero-American Year of Scientific Culture to focus our Booktuber Project.
Our booktubers will recommend readings that have to do with the pandemic from a scientific and, of course, a critical and humanitarian point of view. We will try to create interesting learning situations for students to feel involved, challenged. So that they enjoy learning and so that we too feel that educating is worthwhile. How can we contribute to this Project to hook you?
I choose a challenge. You know what? We start by choosing a topic, a challenge. Something that arouses curiosity, that gives reasons to read. A topic that is related to the curriculum, to your programming. If the projects we choose deviate a lot from what we have planned, it can give us the feeling of doing something extracurricular and complementary and the projects should be a core part of the programming.
I investigate. We start by deciding which question we want to answer. Once the selection is made, we read to find information that specifies our interest. We are looking for texts that can answer the question posed. Perhaps the research itself will make us change, or adjust, the initial question. Let's imagine that we use the web channel reader to search for a book that interests us.
Information can be obtained from multiple channels: articles, interviews, documentaries. But let's remember that helping to read in the digital age requires that we teach how to specify reading objectives, maintain them, contrast information, and verify sources.
Surely now will be the time to put a title that invites potential audiences to hear the review. A good strategy is to ask it in the form of a question. What is the difference between a virus and a bacteria? Have there been plagues prior to the coronavirus? Does it help us now to know how other plagues were overcome? These are some of the questions that, if you had chosen the previous book, you could ask yourself.
We plan. Now is the time to organize ourselves to develop the script for the video that we are going to make. Will we present our challenge individually? In pairs? In groups? How are we going to organize ourselves remotely? What part will each of us do? How do we unite them? What video editing program are we going to use?
For students to write a good script, it is a good idea to have an evaluation rubric ready. This rubric should contain at least: a) Introduction. how we are going to present ourselves, to justify the choice of topic. b) Objective description of the text or texts c) Subjective description. Opinion. The reason for that question, interest, explanation d) Closing.
This rubric will be used in a very different way in Kindergarten than in the fourth year of ESO, but the idea is the same: help students to think, teach them to learn, and reflect on what they learn, how they learn it, and why.
We rehearse. We record and publish. We adjust the script so that children know from a young age that writing is always rewriting. We rehearse over and over again so that communication is fluid.
We will never insist enough on the relevance of the social dimension of learning. These moments of confinement are an excellent opportunity to open the doors of the classroom, transmit what we have learned to the entire educational community.
We evaluate. An essential aspect of learning is taking time to reflect on what we have learned, how we have come along, and what we can improve. Developing metacognitive strategies from a very young age is essential for learning and for continuing to do so throughout life.
Open the virtual doors of our centers, show what students are learning, and share it in the center's magazine or on social networks. This social dimension of learning is what gives them meaning, allows educational inclusion because everyone is present, participates, and learns. Connects with the interests and experience of students, gives reasons to read, to understand, and to communicate what they have learned with others.
This pandemic is being a real shock for our educational system. We have gone from using technologies to improve our classes (Trujillo, 2020) to become almost the only way of learning, of communication.
There will be a before and after this Covid-19. Hopefully, we know how to take advantage of it so that our children learn with meaning and feel the emotion of learning.
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