Active Reading

I recently read Geof''s post on close reading skills and video production, and this spurred me to expand on my own ideas surrounding close and active reading.
I think students have such difficulty with reading closely with a text because they believe that reading involves solely reading the words on the page. They pick up the reading, read it front to back, put it down, and expect to be able to answer any question thrown at them. This is such a flawed view of reading. Reading needs to be an active experience not a passive one. I know that a lot of the methods for active reading involve marking up a text and this makes school districts cringe over the "defacing" of their pricey textbooks, but there are ways around this. A method I plan on using in my classroom is employing the use of many, many post-it notes. At first, I want to make it an assignment to make so many notes on the post-its or write down so many important lines that you would highlight if it was a text you owned, etc. as my students read a text. My hope is that this will eventually become a happen and less strict measures will be needed to be taken to ensure that students interact with the text as they read it. I see this being really helpful to high school students. It teaches a skill that will definitely help them to better digest a text, more intelligently discuss it, and perform better on test, including the standardized texts Geof mentions that require close reading skills.
As always, I'd appreciate any other ideas for active reading activites or criticism on the one I proposed.