Task 1 – Guess you’re wondering what you are being asked to ‘mash-up’?
Are you someone who doesn’t like doing any more reading than you have to? Or are you more of a reading fiend? Research studies show that most students like to read when they can personalise their reading and have good reasons for doing it. Rate yourself as a reader by doing the following questionnaire:
How well did you do?
Task 2 – Your challenge is to create a website with ‘mash ups’ to motivate reluctant readers who don’t like to read. It is very difficult to get disinterested readers to read. You will need to think about the following to on your web site:
Creative ideas to attract disinterested readers and get their attention – if you are a disinterested reader think about what topic or special interests would attract you to look at the website
Use callouts to advertise on your site why personalised reading is so important in doing well in education and life [research some credible facts on why reading is so good for you – most people don’t know this]
Post links to actual reading material that you would recommend someone to get started. This could be some articles that are really funny, special interest communities (like game forums) and sites to read at like online e-zines, e-books and kids/teens newspapers.
Have a section for links to an online reading community or blog site where popular books are recommended to other readers, and that have ratings and reviews. Look at http://www.epicreads.com/ for some ideas.
Task 3 – Give your reluctant readers some short term goals to get them reading. Here is a reading wheel that you might want to recommend they start using. Suggest 20 minutes a day reading one of the ‘genre’ or types of reading segments on the wheel. The wheel can be copied and pasted into a Google doc that can be used as a log.
Try the reading wheel out yourself over this week’s project. You can link to the Independent Reading tab to find links to web sites for each of these genre types.
Task 4 – Show your website to a parent, family member or friend and then interview them on whether they think you have achieved your aim to attract disinterested readers. Take on their responses:
You could consider using the following questions for your interview –
- If you were a disinterested reader, would you be interested by my website?
- What features of the website do you think would attract non-readers?
- What parts of the site could be improved?
- Out of 5 stars, what rating do you give this web site?
Task 5 – Publish the findings of your interview and from this project to your blog.