GroupRead: Where collaborative reading leads to constructive learning

GroupRead is a web-based collaborative reading environment that focuses on reading comprehension for middle school learners outside the classroom. GroupRead leverages the affordances of online social communication as a way to encourage dialogue and to create a community around reading. Core functionalities, such as nonlinear visualizations of conversations, suggested entries into dialogue, and word banks scaffold the interactions between dialogue and reading, allowing learners to construct understanding collaboratively and build on each others’ ideas. GroupRead is an online social experience that strives to connect readers and engage them in personal and thoughtful understandings of text.