3 Tech Tools to Promote Elementary Students’ Oral Fluency

When was the last time you sat beside a student and listened to them read, sharing your thoughts to guide their growth? In a perfect world, teachers would have time each day to devote to this task for all students. Oral fluency is a key component in learning how to read. It also sharpens the skills students need to become effective communicators. When students are provided meaningful opportunities to practice reading aloud, they experience gains not only in fluency, but in confidence as well.

Unfortunately, jam-packed curriculum guides and rigid instructional schedules limit available time for teachers and students. While teachers are working in small groups reinforcing phonics or reading comprehension, fluency practice is often relegated to students reading aloud independently without true accountability for their fluency progress.

Feedback is scarce or nonexistent without an authentic audience. Students become bored doing the same thing week after week. The disconnect can also stagnate reading progress as students view fluency practice as a must-do task of completion versus a get-to-do opportunity to shine. Digital platforms can help get kids excited about literacy practice.

getting kids to read aloud

As an instructional technology coach serving two elementary schools, my conversations with teachers this year have centered around making fluency practice more impactful for student engagement and growth. In our district, students are expected to read aloud weekly using passages provided by our adopted reading program. The challenge we encountered was in the how:

• How can we listen to students and provide feedback if time is so limited?
• How can we get students more engaged in their oral reading tasks each week?
• How can we do these things for free?

Before tackling these questions, we took a step back to unpack our own understanding of fluency components and how this might differ from students’ understanding. In Praise Lee’s article “Guiding Students to Overcome the ‘Cringe’ of Reading Aloud,” students reflected on fluency and created a bulleted list of criteria for good reading. Their answers were enlightening. Many students recognized the importance of speed and perfection but missed the two key skills that all great readers share: automaticity and prosody.

Automaticity, the ability to recognize and read words without stopping to decode them, is a reading skill that can align with speed and perfection (accuracy) but goes much deeper. When students read with automaticity, their cognitive energy is free to make sense of what they are reading, providing an opportunity to enhance all areas of oral reading expression.

Prosody, or the pitch, phrasing, and pace of reading expression, is the magic that makes words come alive. According to the article “The Science of Reading Comprehension Instruction,” prosody is a key component of oral reading fluency that can have direct positive outcomes for reading comprehension as well.

To connect all components, while tackling the challenges of time, student engagement, and cost, many of our teachers shifted to digital tools to capture student fluency. Below are three options our teachers explored this year.

1. Book Creator. What makes Book Creator a powerhouse for high-impact fluency engagement is the ease of use and ability for students to create, customize, and share their reading with others. Free accounts include 40 books with unlimited pages, which is perfect for creating digital fluency journals in an elementary classroom.

Each week, students customize a page of their journal with three tasks:

• Take a photo of their reading passage (or upload a screenshot if using a digital story)
• Record themselves reading the passage
• Enhance their page with images and illustrations using stock photos, icons, or emojis, or creating their own illustrations with the digital pen tool

Teachers have instant access to all books and can quickly provide text or audio feedback on student pages. Books can be published and shared by URL for classmates or families. By selecting “Read to Me,” listeners can hear the student reading with automatic page turning, too!

In addition, Book Creator provides a multitude of premade templates and resources for additional support, so students can expand their oral reading practice by adding their voice to anything they create in the program without teachers spending extra time making resources from scratch.

2. Adobe Express. To capture student fluency in recordings of two minutes or less, try Adobe Express for Education. Using the Animate characters feature, students can choose a character, customize a background, and then have that digital character “speak” and move with their recorded voice.

To use this with the Adobe Express classroom feature, teachers create an assignment, choose the Animate character project type, add an Assignment title, and assign to their class. The Gallery feature can be enabled if you want students to see and hear their classmates’ creations. Individual recordings can also be shared by URL or downloaded for use in other projects.

Another feature that makes Animate characters unique is the ability to upload your own background image. Students can even upload a photo of a person and add lips as a character type so that any image can “speak” fluently!

3. Seesaw. Seesaw is a popular program with our youngest learners for its ease of use and shared templates. Teachers can sign up for a free account, create a class, add student names, and then locate and save up to 100 activities in their account.

By searching the word “fluency,” teachers can quickly discover activities that can be used or modified to capture students’ oral reading. Some activities, like this Fluency Recording and Self Assessment, guide students in setting a goal, recording their fluency, and then reflecting on their progress.

Teachers can enable parent access to Seesaw, providing an instant portal for families to hear their students read. Parents and teachers can also leave text or audio comments, making this a great choice for feedback and encouragement.

Reflections and Extensions

When students began using digital tools to capture their fluency, engagement soared. Many replayed their recordings and self-assessed their fluency, focusing on verbal expression, not simply reading quickly to complete the task. They were proud of their work and excited to share with others.

As students become more confident with their fluency, the options for creativity are endless. Students might write a script to record themselves in a podcast or video. They can layer audio on top of slide decks or record themselves reading stories for younger students. They can also share fluency work on learning management platforms, like Schoology and Canvas.

By using digital tools to capture and share oral reading, students see themselves not just as readers, but as communicators. Their fluency work becomes purposeful while providing teachers insight to support continued learning all year long.