Virtual Reports on Real Books: Goodreads.com and Book Reports in the Digital Age

Most of us remember the first book we fell in love with, the first story to take us on a journey out of our world and into someone else’s. 

I’ve taught English for many years now, and it seems that as the years pass, less of my students are reading outside of their courses.  Almost none of my current juniors and seniors are reading for pleasure.  They might read to learn information or because they have to, but nowadays students turn to films, games, the internet, and television for their escape.

A few years ago, I began assigning a project to my juniors.  The basics: choose an American book, read it with a partner, discuss it, and present it to your classmates, enticing them to want to read it.  Sounds like an old-fashioned book report, right? So it is.  The conundrum for most of my reluctant readers was in book choice. What to read? Who to read?  The easy thing for me to do was to simply tell them about a few books and give them a list of choices.

Last year, I discovered that Goodreads.com was another excellent way for students to explore, discover, and select books that interest them. 

I still remember walking up and down the long musty-smelling rows of books at my school library and basing my choice on cover art. Man, how things have changed.  Now, you only need to hop online to surf new book releases. In fact, many new books have their own preview video!  This is a new age—a digital one.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s still okay to talk to students about books, but like the saying goes- show don’t tell. The greater impact comes in showing them.  Enter, Goodreads.com.  Now, this website isn’t new; in fact, many of you may have been using it for years.  However, I’ve discovered a few interesting facts about the site, and one amazing way to utilize it in the classroom, particularly for English and History.

WHY TEACHERS WANT TO USE GOODREADS IN THE CLASSROOM:

1. Goodreads.com is free!

2.  It has over seven million subscribers; this means that there are millions of book reviews to help students choose the right material.

3.  It allows teachers to model independent reading!

4. Teachers can follow their students and can get emails daily or weekly with updates from their students regarding books rated or marked to-read, read, reading.

5. Teachers can create “groups” and set those groups to public, private, restricted, or even secret.

6. Teachers can begin discussions in their “Group,” to which students can reply.

7. Teachers can use the site as a way for students to evaluate course reading selections.

WHY STUDENTS ARE INTERESTED IN USING GOODREADS:

1. Goodreads is an asynchronous environment where students can discuss or read about literature on their own time, at their own pace, and in any location.

2.  Students can create anonymous profiles.

3. Students learn to write for a specific audience.

4. It allows users to select books to add to their bookshelf; to choose “read, reading, or to-read” statuses for books; to set goals for the year and to track their progress; to write reviews for any book; to follow favorite authors who are also members on the site; and to even self-publish their own work.

5. Students are able to read about a book before starting it.

Book reports, or as I sneakily call them “novel workshops,” still have value, as does reading for pleasure, and using a social networking site such as Goodreads makes the selection process less painful and the reading more enjoyable!

Prezi: Reinventing the Wheel

It’s a small world.  And thanks to technology, it’s smaller than ever.  Whether it’s connecting between campuses, cross-country, internationally, or simply outside of normal school hours, students are interacting and sharing information at an unparalleled rate. The classroom no longer has walls, and learning no longer only takes place between bells.

Social media is an amazing first step in cultivating the classroom without walls, and Prezi is a fantastic social media tool.

For years, I’ve searched for the perfect presentation program—one that allows me to quickly put together an introduction to a unit for my students, but also something that was, unlike PowerPoint, dynamic.  I wanted a program that would allow me to connect with my students outside of our classroom.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t hate PowerPoint, I just find it strangely complicated and difficult to make interesting or interactive. For group projects, you are limited to one person working at a time, and often, the file is too big to email. And forget doing a project quickly; it sometimes takes hours to upload pictures, link videos, or create slide transitions.

Like many other educators, I’ve waited for something new to wow me, and finally, this summer, another teacher mentioned Prezi.

I even liked the name…Prezi. It sounds modern, hip, Apple-esque.  And it is all of those things.  I still remember the reaction I had the first time I viewed a prezi; my jaw dropped.  I couldn’t believe how incredibly visual and seamless it was!  In fact, it’s the first presentation software I’ve used that caters to the visual / kinesthetic learner.

Not only does Prezi look amazing, but it is a cloud-based presentation tool!  That means that you never have to email another file to your students; you can simply direct them to the website (if you make your Prezi public); in fact, you will be able to watch the file on any computer or tablet anywhere.  Another perk of cloud-based presentations is that your prezi is saved somewhere other than your computer’s hard drive, clearing up much-needed space and protecting you against accidental deletion.

Perhaps the most valuable feature of Prezi is that it allows students to interact with lessons on their own time, in their own space, while fostering the collaboration that we all like to see.  The “meeting” option allows up to ten people to login and work on the same presentation—even at the same time.

At the private college prep school where I teach, we currently have over a hundred boarding students who live in a dorm off campus.  It is often difficult for these students to work on projects with our day students, and as I like to assign a variety of cooperative learning projects and assignments, I’ve been very frustrated with PowerPoint.

Our school, like many others, faces a new challenge—providing web-based networking tools to our students and instructors.  Prezi is an answer to that challenge.  For example, just last week, my juniors were working on literary criticism projects.  Most of the groups were made up of both day and boarding students, and Prezi made it possible for them to all meet online and build their presentations without even being in the same building!


Key features of the software:
1.     It’s free for educators, as long as you have an email address that includes your school or district name.
2.     It’s free for your students to use (there is a free non-education version available as well).
3.     It looks crisp and modern; it emphasizes the visual.
4.     It uses a zooming tool (which awes your students).
5.     There are no complicated menus, just one wheel of options (I call it the “Wheel of Awesome”).
6.     Every single addition of text, picture, video, or object can be done in less than two or three clicks.  (For the designers out there, you can go five or six clicks to specialize your prezi.)
7.     You can import your old PowerPoint files.
8.     You can change the path (order of “slides”) your prezi takes at any time.
9.     You can make your prezi public and share it with the world or make it private for a select audience.
10. Youtube videos can be inserted by copying and pasting the address.
11.   You never have to leave the prezi to open another window, unlike PowerPoint.
12.  Your students can find your prezi by typing your name into the search bar of the website!

Before you race to type “prezi.com” into your browser, I have a few suggestions
1.     Forget everything you learned using PowerPoint.  (It only confused me when using the software.)
2.     If you want to add text, just click anywhere on the screen.
3.     Mac users zoom in and out using the two-finger scroll method.  Click and drag to move the screen around.  I had a rough first few minutes trying to learn this!
4.     If you want to change, move, manipulate, rotate, or re-size text on the screen, click on it once until the Wheel of Awesome pops up and use the menu on the wheel.


As we begin to change our curriculum and delivery to meet our digital-native students’ needs, Prezi will impress where other presentation software falls short!   It will promote differentiation, cooperative learning, lesson sharing, and social networking.  Not only will students and teachers be able to build their own dynamic presentations, which they can share with the Prezi community, but they will also be able to use others’ prezis as teaching and learning tools.