Improve Online Reading Comprehension with a Highlight & Right-Click!

Chances are you or your students come across words you don't understand when reading on the . Try as you might to discern the word's meaning using context clues, sometimes the necessary info just isn't there, or you are focused on the task at hand without adequate time to figure out what the word is. There's a super easy and quick way to figure out an unfamiliar word or term you come across online if you are using Google Chrome.

Just Highlight & Right-Click!

Click This GIF to View a Larger Demo of the
Highlight/Right-Click Process

A few minutes ago, I was reading an interesting article on how to get yourself or others to change their mind when I came across a word I was not familiar with: Schadenfreude. So, I did this:

• Double-clicked the word to select/highlight it.
• Right-clicked the word and selected Search Google for "Schadenfreude".
• Read the definition in the new tab that opened up.
• I also clicked the sound icon under the word to hear how it is pronounced.

After getting an idea of what the word meant, I returned back to the tab with the article I was reading and carried on.

Train Yourself & Teach Your Students to Use This Trick

I encourage you to train yourself and teach your students to use this quick trick for improving vocabulary and comprehension. Teaching a new skill in context when the need arises helps transfer it to long-term learning. Quick and natural in context ways to teach this trick include:

• When you and your students are discussing online information which you are projecting in front of a group or the whole class, highlight and right-click a word your students seem unfamiliar with.
• When a student approaches you to ask what a word they are reading online means, talk them through the highlight and right-click trick

I hope this tip has been helpful! If you know other quick tech tricks that enhance learning, please share in the comments below, so we can all learn together.

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All original work in this post by Sandy Kendell is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0). Please see specifics on my re-use policy before re-posting/re-using any of my blog content.

Ideas for Using the Voice Typing Tool in Google Docs

Voice typing can help students overcome barriers or lead to new learning opportunities. If you are using Google Docs and have access to a computer, laptop, or Chromebook with a microphone, you have everything you need to get started with voice typing in your classroom.

Ideas for Using Voice Typing

• Emerging or developing readers and writers can voice type an assignment or story. Then practice revising and editing skills using traditional keyboard techniques.
• Students with reading or writing challenges, such as dyslexia or dysgraphia, can use voice typing to help them express their ideas without the barrier of their learning disability.
• When teaching the difference between the conventions of spoken versus written language, have students compose short sentences or stories or have a conversation using voice typing. Then collaborate to edit the spoken text so it conforms to the standards of written text.
• Ask students to read aloud a short passage, recording their reading using voice typing. Then, have them compare what was typed to the original text that they read from. This can give students a visual example of their reading accuracy. 
• When studying the traditions of oral storytelling or the drawbacks of gossip, play a game of telephone. As the message is passed around the room, have each student repeat it by voice typing it into a Google Doc before passing it along verbally to the next student. (Find a way to do this so the students can't see what was previously typed by others.) Visually compare how the story changes from the original to the final version (and the versions in between.)

When thinking about voice typing in the classroom, what other instructional uses come to mind?

How to Use the Voice Typing Tool

If you are not familiar with how to use the Voice Typing Tool in Google Docs, watch the one minute video tutorial I recorded below. For a detailed list of voice typing commands, visit Google Docs Help.

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All original work in this post by Sandy Kendell is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. Please see specifics on my re-use policy in the right-hand column of my blog before re-posting/re-using any of my blog content.

The New Literacy

One of my first assignments was to react to a quote from the first week's reading. Below is the quote I picked and my response to it.

In The New Literacy: The 3 Rs Evolve into the 4 Es, Armstrong and Warlick state:

The challenge to us as educators lies in keeping up with an information environment that has changed dramatically in the past 10 years, a decade during which the very nature of information has changed in appearance, location, accessibility, application, and communication. Thus, it is crucial that when teaching literacy to our students, we emphasize skills that reflect the information environment of the present, not the past.

This quote appealed to me because it succinctly explains the tremendous change I have witnessed in technology and education during my career. It also emphasizes for me the gravity of the truth that we cannot settle for “teaching the way we were taught”.

I myself am struggling with wanting to print out the articles we are reading for this course so I can learn the way I’m wired to learn – by physically highlighting and making notes in the margins. This struggle combined with the quote above makes me realize that those of us whose brains were wired before the early 1990’s when the digital age really began to take hold in the main stream have an incredible task before us as we strive to create literate students who have grown up bombarded by and wired to take in information in ways and quantities that we barely comprehend. Learning more about learning styles and needs of digital learners needs to become and remain a priority for me so I can help prepare our teachers to successfully educate their digital students.

NOTE: Opening quote from
THE NEW Literacy: The 3Rs Evolve into the 4Es
Sara Armstrong; David Warlick
Technology & Learning; Sep 2004