Interview: How Chicago Public Schools use Bounce

Below: Q&A with Rob Residori, Tech Coordinator and Teacher for Chicago Public Schools, who just recently started using Bounce to improve reading instructions for 6th-8th graders in Chicago Public Schools.

How are you changing the world?

I work for a federal reading grant in Chicago Public Schools called Striving Readers. We work in 30 schools across the city to help increase teacher capacity, improve reading instruction and support struggling readers through intervention in grades 6-8. I work as the technology coordinator for all of these schools and I support teachers and interventionists in technology integration. While we focus primarily on literacy, a major part of the focus is incorporating and improving literacy instruction in the content areas such as science, social studies and to some extent math.

What does your position entail? What's your typical day?

I work with 6th-8th grade teachers and students. I help design lessons as well as provide technical support and training for this grant. I am a former classroom teacher, reading specialist and Chicago Public School administrator.

How do you Bounce with the students?

I love Bounce and think it has huge potential in the education market. So far, Ia''ve used it for having students annotate their search results and for reading non-fiction articles. For instance, we might use yahoo to search for Ancient Greece and send it through Bounce. We have the students write about which links they would choose and why and which they wouldna''t and why not. Ita''s a great way to asses their knowledge of how to read the results of a search engine and since their work remain stored (via Bounce), teachers can always go back to it as evidence.

Another way wea''ve used it is for online reading, especially non-fiction. Our students typically dona''t observe non-fiction text features and therefore need to be explicitly taught about them. We may have the students look at a given article on Timeforkids.com perhaps and annotate various points or make predictions/write about how they support the text. A student might look at the title or a heading and write about how it supports the overall message from the author.

Any other ways you're thinking of using Bounce?

I havena''t tried this yet, we were thinking of having students visit a pre-made annotation page that the teacher creates and read the teacher-made prompts and questions in order to provide their answers below the teachera''s prompts. Afterwords they'd save their work and send it back to the teacher.

How can folks contact you and find out more about Striving Readers Grant?

You can find me on twitter and feel free to check out Striving Readers.