Session 9 (Nov 11) - Creating interactive tasks for reading comprehension

To many students, reading comprehension can be very boring because in many occasions, they are asked to do some MC exercises after reading a passage. However, with the advancement of technology, reading tasks or exercises are not necessarily that dull as we think. They can be interesting, yet simple to be created.

Task 1: J Cloze and J Cross

Tonight, we learnt how to use J Cloze and J Cross to make exercises for reading comprehension. This is the passage I used to make the J Cloze and J Cross tasks.

Today, Hong Kong is a modern city, but 60 years ago it was very different.

There was no MTR 60 years ago. Everybody

travelled from Hong Kong to Kowloon in

small boats or by Star Ferry. There was a tram

going up to The Peak 60 years ago and we can

still ride on it today. Now, The Peak Tram and the

Star Ferry are popular with tourists.

These days we see lots of people in Hong Kong with

mobile phones but nobody had a mobile phone

60 years ago. Telephones were not even common

at that time. Only some people had a phone at home.

Some people had a radio but nobody had a TV at that time. 

There were no electronic games, computers or DVD players at that time.
Children played hopscotch, Chinese chess and hide-and-seek.

J Cloze is a programme which allows students to do cloze exercise after reading a passage. I would say it can be also used after students learn some vocabulary. Students can simply read the hints of the vocab and type the answers. This can test their spelling as well. Below is a J Cloze exercise I made during the lesson. Guess what, it was as easy that you only need to prepare a passage in word, copy the passage into the programme and make the gaps for cloze exercise with a few clicks of buttons. 

Try and see if you can do it and what a magic it is.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/v489idvtapg5uwy/Chris_cloze.htm?dl=0

J Cross is another fun way to test students' understanding to some vocabulary. If you have already had what words to be tested in mind, you just need less than a few minutes to create the cross word puzzle and type the hints. Let's have a look at the cross word I made.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/kqz6eg9jw6aul4a/Chris_cross.htm?dl=0

Task 2: Actively Learn - interactive comprehension task

Actively Learn is a useful interactive application that allows teachers to create an interactive reading unit, using their own texts, a web page, or the programme's built-in passages. Questions, notes, and multimedia materials can be added to the reading text so students are not just reading it, they are interacting with it!
Below is the interactive task I made based on the famous story - The Little Match Girl.
https://read.activelylearn.com/#student/reader/280474/notes
You may also need the class code to access the task: 3722b