When you read anything, many things happen in your head that nobody notices. But good readers know and can identify these things. Sometimes we call them “movies in our head, thinking abouts, connections, questions or just plain wonders…”.
The Study Skills toolbar in Kurzweil 3000 allows great flexibility in making this thinking visible so we can explore it further at a later time. We can colour-code to our hearts content, use sticky notes or text notes or even a voice note. All of these can be extracted to a 2-3 column note structure to help us categorize ideas/phrases. And we always have the support of our crystal ball (word prediction dictionary).
So we have the tools but how do we make our thinking truly visible? We can start off with using the bubble notes feature by asking questions as prompts for students to answer. But we’ve all had students who just filled in the blanks
and say “I’m done!” Judi Mathot came and modeled a think aloud with us using the text,The Smile by Ray Bradbury. As she stopped at the end of each paragraph, she did a think aloud and these were recorded using the tools above. Thoughts ranged from making connections to all sorts of personal things and events, asking questions – lots of questions to make sense of the text, including the vocabulary seen.
I think this provided a much stronger visual and auditory representation of thinking than using bubble notes as teacher generated questions. What I really liked was the power of the student to be in control of their own reading – to really make those connections that make the most sense and to take those recordings to reflection in a deeper sense and to have ongoing conversations with others.
Thanks to everyone who participated in our session. What do you think? What connections did you make? I would love to hear your thinking and questions.