The Promethean ActivBoard can be utilized to deliver thoughtfully designed lessons filled with rich content, activities and multimedia files.  Often times, these lessons are text-rich as well, which is great, unless you are a struggling reader.  In designing a lesson, it is important to remember the students.  Reading may be the single most important skill for pupils to learn, yet in the National Assessment of Educational Progress report (2003), it is noted that 37% of 4th graders and 26% of both 8th and 12th graders read below grade level.  The ActivBoard tools can help students who struggle with reading and even those who don’t, follow along with text, recognize key words, and pick out important concepts.

Day 5:  Tools to Focus the Reader

Strategy 1:  Use the highlighter tool to Annolight the Text   The Greece Central School District has posted an excellent guide to Reading Strategies in which “Annolighting a Text” is recommended.  Annolighting is simply highlighting main ideas, key concepts and important details.  Follow these tips to help the reader focus attention and strengthen reading comprehension:

• Highlight only the targeted information.
• Highlight only necessary words.
• Use different colors to highlight different ideas; i.e. One color for main idea and another for supporting details.                                       

Strategy 2: Use the Reveal Tool to help students follow along or sound out a word phonetically  Just like moving a piece of paper down a page of text helps a reader keep his place on the page, pulling the Revealer Tool down the ActivBoard can help students stay on track and not become overwhelmed by large amounts of information.  When the Revealer Tool is selected the entire page goes black.  Do not be alarmed!  All work is still there, it is just covered by the Revealer screen.  The screen can be removed by touching the ActivBoard along one of the edges and dragging the mouse across the board.

• Remove the screen from top to bottom to have students follow along with text.
• Remove the screen from left to right to aid students in sounding out words phonetically.
• Remove from any direction to reveal illustrations or context clues.                                                                                                                                                                      

                  

Strategy 3: Drag Text onto the Screen in order of Relevancy   By hiding some text off of the screen, students are not overwhelmed by information.  When not all of the information is shown at once, students are encouraged to think, guess what comes next, and relate previous knowledge to new concepts.   To hide some of the text, simply push part of the text off of the screen.  To reveal it, grab some of the sentence and pull it back into position.  See this technique demonstrated in the video below.