Teacher Knows if You've Done the E-Reading

Amy Truter

CA
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Streitfeld, D. (2013). Teacher knows if you've done the e-reading. The New York Times. Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/09/technology/coursesmart-e-textbooks-track-students-progress-for-teachers.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

This article describes a program called CourseSmart that tracks college students' progress through digital textbooks. This software allows college professors to see how often their students are reading the textbook, when they skip pages, and what kind of notes they are taking using the highlighting and notes tool available through the textbook, assigning each student an "engagement index" that condenses their textbook usage into a single number.

I think this article is super interesting, because, while describing college courses, this technology could just as easily be adapted to use in elementary and high school classrooms, especially as more and more schools adopt more technology in the classroom. I think giving teachers the information about how their students are interacting (or not) with the textbooks will give teachers an opportunity to explore alternate teaching methods, and maybe using this technology in conjunction with curriculum as discussed in Remixing Melville could get students engaged in all new ways.