Glose is an online tool that collates a wealth of reading materials and makes it all social.
The idea here is to make reading and literacy a more engaging experience for students. That applies both for them individually by being able to interact more deeply with the text by doing things such as highlighting and making notes, but also in a group in which a more social side is available, seeing each others notes and more.
Teachers can see student progress so that this tool helps guide them on progress or areas of struggle.
This guides lays out what you need to know to see if Glose could work for you.
What is Glose?
Glose is an online reading platform that's aimed at educating student readers with its huge library of interactive reading materials.
Featuring more than one million books, comprised of ebooks and audio books, this is a huge literacy resource for students and teachers to access. Since it's digital, it also works across most devices so students and educators can access it wherever they are and with whatever device is available at that time.
How does Glose work?
Glose is a digital library that works across multiple devices so to get started you will need to download the app. You can then go through the library of books and buy those you want before downloading.
This allows students to download the book to their device for offline reading. But, crucially, it'll also sync that across devices using the cloud so they can easily jump between devices when reading.
This also means that any annotations or notes made will appear on the book, no matter the device that the student or teacher is using. Teachers can invite students to accounts and can then set books and monitor reading progress from a helpful dashboard.
What are the best Glose features?
Glose has a huge library of books available digitally to students. The social aspect of this platform makes for a great way to highlight, annotate, and share comments, allowing students to effectively read in groups without actually being together or reading at the same pace.
The fact there are more than one million titles, including classics, makes this a great way to assign readings and teach how to interact with those novels. Usefully, there is an option to add voice recordings, allowing teachers to offer feedback or guidance. But this can also be a helpful way for students to make notes or share thoughts with other readers.
A helpful Chrome extension allows teachers to clip on web links and share content beyond the book itself, which can make for a great jump off point to further online guided exploration.
Book reviews and the creation of reading lists are also possible, allowing the app to offer even more depth of engagement.
Usefully, teachers can use the dashboard to see student progress. Graphs and multiple data points make it easy to see how the class and individuals are progressing.
How much does Glose cost?
Glose is free to download and get started.
While there are plenty of free titles (more than 4,000), most of the books are there to be bought on a book-by-book basis. The prices vary but once a book is downloaded, it is then owned.
Glose best tips and tricks
Start a book club
A virtual book club allows you to ask questions of students or highlight text for them to focus on and report back.
Paraphrase
Have students make selections of highlights and then paraphrase in their own words to practice understanding and explaining.
Book cards
Have students create book cards and share these as well as comment on others to create interactive discussion online and in class.
