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Teaching how to do college: helping students read for learning

old desk with feather pen in an inkwell beside a tattered notebook.

Nathan Loewen, Department of Religious Studies Learning to read is a crucial skill for higher education. Student reading has changed due to the shift, and back, from going entirely online. When you order textbooks for your courses, are they mostly digital? (e.g. Access granted) Or, to make your course affordable and expose students to cutting-edge scholarship, do you forgo textbooks and post all your readings in Blackboard? When your students do research, are they using the Libraries e-book holdings or journal […]

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Teach Your Students Active Reading: Assign Texts in Blackboard with Hypothesis

bookshelves that spell the word "read"

by Lauren Horn Griffin, Department of Religious Studies Your Blackboard course menu includes Hypothesis on your “build content” menu. Hypothesis works with files you add to your course. It also works with any website. Hypothesis is a teaching tool that allows you to have your students “show” how they are reading your course content. With the Hypothesis tool, anyone in the course may add annotations with text, images, websites, and LaTeX equations. Anyone in the course can reply to those […]

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Discussing Readings with Hypothesis: Tips to Create Small Groups

laptop, phone, and notebook on a desk

by Nathan Loewen, A&S Faculty Technology Liaison Hypothesis is a tool in Blackboard that makes students’ reading active, visible, and social. It is quite easy to add a Hypothesis-enabled reading to a Blackboard course shell. Your students can then annotate, as well as read and reply to annotations posted by all other students in the course or section. All of this happens online. If you wish to break the class up into smaller cohorts to read and annotate in separate […]

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Voyant Tools for Basic Text Analysis

word cloud generated by Voyant Tools

by Jessica Porter, Office of Educational Technology (eTech) Whether you teach literature, history, or another text-heavy course, your students may benefit from the use of digital tools that enable them to dig deeper into a text and visualize its patterns and trends. Voyant Tools offers a suite of web-based tools that allow you to upload texts and perform basic text mining functions. The most popular item in the Voyant toolkit is Cirrus, a word cloud generator that displays words according to their frequency in a given text. The words that appear most often are […]

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Listen: Critical Reading is a Foundational College Skill

Teaching Hub

Critical reading is a central, foundational college skill, essential to all courses. In this interview with Nathan Loewen, Catherine Roach talks about teaching critical reading and how she pushes students to “ruminate” and become better readers and thinkers. Some of the questions asked: In what classes do you emphasize this skill? How do you explain critical reading to your students? How do you teach students to read critically and make connections across texts? What challenges do you encounter while teaching critical reading […]

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Teaching with Guided Readings

by Andrea Barton, Department of English Introduction From my perspective, a guided reading exercise is any reading assignment that is teacher-annotated. In other words, this is a reading assignment that contains either brief or developed comments, questions, brief explanations, or other such teacher-input that students should encounter while they read. This input functions much like a second level of assignment instructions — not just what I want the student to read, but how I want the student to read it. […]

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How I Guide Students to Read for My Class

Student reading a textbook

by Chris Lynn, Department of Anthropology One of the downsides of being a professor is that we were all the types of people who generally liked to read and liked to learn more, which is what led us to be successful in college, go on to graduate school, and become professors. The easiest students to teach are younger versions of ourselves. The rest are not nearly so inclined to read the material. Because there is so much to cover in […]

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