By Jenn Nielson

Standard 5 – Students develop reading fluency to read aloud grade level text effortlessly without hesitation.

Obj. 2 – Read grade level text effortlessly with clarity A.) Read grade level text in 3-4 word phrases using

intonation, expression, and punctuation cues.

• Our little reading group consisted of a group of bright young children who were able to read fairly well…

• However… they struggled reading with expression, and mostly just read the words they saw on the page. They did not know what some of the punctuation marks told them to do. And they did not remember well what they had read…

After teaching them about punctuation and practicing with our voices a bit…

I implemented technology into our lesson with the goal in mind that they would be able to hear and understand the difference in how they sounded when reading with expression and with attention to punctuation versus merely reading the words on the page.

I began by having each student read the same passage twice. The first time I just had them read the words. The second time I pointed out the punctuation marks and had them read attentively to these, and with expression…

Following this, we listened to each of the

recordings as a group and

decided which version sounded

better.

What’s your vote?

• Hooray for improvement! Goals that I had been trying to help them achieve and understand finally made sense to them!

• I heard them playing with their voice to sound like the characters in the story…

• I heard them overly exaggerating how the story sounded and therefore enjoying it more…

• They seemed to understand the story better… !

I think the technology really helped the students to understand and be excited about the principles of good reading that I was trying to instill in them. It was exciting to hear them change as readers because they could hear themselves and knew it made a difference.

While using the technology with one child however, I tended to neglect the rest. I had given them the assignment to practice with a partner, but I was not monitoring them very effectively.

I would change this by having some form of follow-up with their partner work.

Students of Technology: The students participated in the use of the technology actively with their voices, while I pressed the buttons and helped the presentation along.

: Technology Use is Essential The use of the technology was essential to my goal of having the students really hear the difference in how they read versus how they could sound when they read, and how much more interesting the story can be made to sound when they do.

: Focus on Learning Task The students did not actually learn to use the technology, as I was the one operating the player; therefore not too much time detracted from the learning time and objectives. The technology focused our attention on the students’ VOICE, which was my goal.

: Added Value Helping the students hear themselves would not have been an easy task without the use of technology. The added value brought to the lesson by the technology was that students could personally see the results of them applying the teaching. I was able to help them hear what the audience hears - and that would have been difficult without technology