Fantastic for ensuring your students read actively!
Community Review for Actively Learn
My Take
Teachers need to be careful with copyrighted texts, as stated in the Terms of Use. Some of the texts do cost money per student, which could get expensive, but a majority of texts are available for free. It would be great to have the ability as a teacher to "curate" a textbook of my own from existing texts into one file, and it would also be great to be able to edit the text itself once it's uploaded into the system, both features I'm sure are forthcoming.
How I Use It
I love Actively Learn for older texts such as The Scarlet Letter. This tends to be a text that most students struggle with and give up quickly on, only to pick up Cliffs Notes or something similar and try to fake it through the unit. Actively Learn lets me actually SEE their reading--I know who is "getting it" and who is not, when to intervene, when to let a student advance on their own. I love incorporating links, images, and video into the margins of the text so my visual learners have support, especially in a setting like Puritan New England, which can be hard to visualize. Finally, since the notes I make stay in the margin, students can read freely and use my notes if they need them.