As social studies tend to be heavy on reading, literacy is a major issue. This week I have been focusing in on tweets about digitizing textbooks and using technology to help students with their reading and study skills. I found three tweets that were of particular interest.
Scott Meech (@smeech) posted tweet about iAnnotate, a program that allows an iPad user to read, annotate, organize, and send pdf files. A teacher or student can easily mark up a text, add notes and bookmarks and attach photo annotations. This means that students can highlight and annotate 50 pages of pdf without printing it all out. Teachers can give students feedback on papers while keeping a class paper-free. Most important, teachers and students can both have copies of each draft of a paper throughout the process, making it easier for both to be on the same page. Check it out: http://www.ajidev.com/iannotate/
Another interesting read I found was a blog I found through Silvia Tolisano’s (@langwitches) tweet. The blog “Why Focusing on Digital Texts is a Good Step” (http://www.ryanbretag.com/blog/?p=2379) discussed the importance of the mindset shift that would need to occur with crossing over to digital texts – the shift to using them as content rather than curriculum. Using digital texts allows for far more resources to be available to students (rather than a single textbook). Since social studies has a rich store of primary, secondary, and tertiary sources, these can easily supplement and enhance content learning.
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