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Matt’s Media Tips 10-8 Uncovering the Code - Digital Tools to help improve reading - Two Part Series A couple of weeks ago an educator in Connecticut asked me if I could recommend a few digital resources that could help her students improve their reading skills. I immediately thought of and recommended using closed captioned videos (see Matt’s Tips and Tricks 9-17). But she challenged me to go deeper. “Using closed captioned video is a good strategy for readers, but I need something to help me engage my kids and help them decode the actual words, to figure out how to sound out and chunk words, that kind of stuff. Can you help me with that,” she asked? Great question, I thought, and we could spend days talking about, researching, and writing papers on the subject. Let me do a little digging was my response. As I noodled and researched I found that five themes/instructional practices surfaced over and over again These strategies were as follows: 1. Breaking down the sounds - Phonemes 2. Chunking unfamiliar sounds and words 3. Re-Reading 4. Predicting 5. Re-Stating In addition to these five strategies, students who could connect to the written content greatly improved or mastered reading. In fact, students responded best when their teachers provided many different ways that they could express their learning.* *Bridget Dalton and C. Patrick Proctor, Reading As Thinking Integrating Strategy Instruction in a Universally Designed Digital Literacy Environment, “Providing multiple means of strategic learning and expression.” Page 8-9. CAST, National Center on Universal Design for Learning http://www.udlcenter.org/sites/udlcenter.org/files/ ReadingAsThinking_0.pdf