![]() Such voices include Sheryl Sandberg, the ACLU, Jeff Jarvis, Farhad Manjoo, and Felix Salmon, among many others. “We want to privilege those voices to help the literacy project.” “Surfacing a professional within the conversation is something we wanted to do,” explains Rap Genius Chief of Education Jeremy Dean. Rap Genius’ popularity is due mostly to its army of “verified artists”-rappers, writers, and public figures-who annotate songs and articles, often providing insight that others can’t. In a similar vein, News Genius-part of Rap Genius, the popular website that collects and crowdsources annotation on rap lyrics-is a tool that allows news readers to upload and comment in-line on news articles and primary sources, such as the president’s annual State of the Union address, which was the first non-music item annotated on the site. Then, like Rochowicz did for his students, they can create their own set of reaction buttons to annotate the text with, or they can use Ponder’s built-in ones. When an individual reader logs onto the site, he or she is prompted to create a “class” and invite others to join it. He created it three years ago to share content in a curated social reading community. And most simply, these tools can be used to improve the commenting process, which often is the most interesting part of reading online.Īlex Selkirk, Ponder’s founder, uses the software as his main news reading tool. They allow online readers to interact with each other through reading communities-be they educational, professional, or social-as well as to make personal connections to texts that they might not otherwise be inclined to read deeply. Whether used for in-line commentary from journalists on primary documents, group annotation of subject relevant news in school, or collapsable context and commentary alongside news stories, Web-native tools for reading critically and communally online hold a lot of potential to help readers navigate the news. This turn toward interactive reading is driving the creation of a whole suite of annotation-type tools. Though they might not describe it this way, Rochowicz-and many other New York City teachers who use Ponder to read news articles and primary sources with their students-are, in a sense, teaching news literacy by encouraging students to build more sophisticated and engaged news reading habits. Now, at the end of the school year, they regularly read and annotate content from The Washington Post, The Bureau of Investigative Journalism, the Heritage Foundation, the Mitchell Report, The Nation, and The Atlantic, as well as various policy documents. He instructed them to diversify their sources. To his surprise, the first time they used Ponder, Rochowicz realized that all his students had exclusively selected New York Times articles for their research. ![]() And after they have all found and highlighted something, it informs a different sort of discussion, and it also shows you the sources everyone is looking at.” “We had that one shared text that’s a foundational piece, and are finding other texts to connect to it. “We were looking at how to make sense of all of these different philosophies,” explains Rochowicz. Responses are aggregated and sent back to the class feed, which the teacher controls. These allow students to mark points in the article that relate to what they are learning in class-in this case, about economic theories. Ponder works as a browser extension that tracks how long a reader spends on a page, and it allows them to make inline annotations, which include highlights, text, and reaction buttons. The students were to annotate their articles using Ponder, a tool that teachers can use to track what their students read and how they react to it. Last fall, Thomas Rochowicz, an economics teacher at Washington Heights Expeditionary Learning School in New York, asked his seniors to research news stories about steroids, drone strikes, and healthcare that could be applied to their class reading of Michael Sandel’s Justice.
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