On Tuesday evening I gave a presentation in Second Life for school librarians and media specialists. One of the topics that I talked about was alternatives to traditional book report assignments. While this post is a follow-up to that presentation, the post on its own should give you some ideas for alternatives to traditional book report assignments.
1. Create book trailers. I ran a post about book trailers during the summer which
you can read here. In short, a book trailer is a short video created by students to highlight the key points of a book. When creating their book trailers students should be trying to "sell" viewers on a book. To create their videos your students could use
Animoto for Education,
JayCut, or
PhotoPeach. Learn more about these free video creation tools in my free guide
Making Videos on the Web.
2. Create animated or stop-motion videos about a book's plot. To make an animated video try
Memoov which is a free service that your students can use to create an animated video book review.
Memoov allows users to create animated videos up to five minutes in length. Creating an animated video with
Memoov can be as simple as selecting a setting image(s), selecting a character or characters, and adding dialogue.
If stop-motion videos are more your speed, Kevin Hodgson's
Making Stopmotion Movies is a fantastic resource for directions and advice on making stop-motion movies.
3. Create literature maps. Using Google Maps or Google Earth students can map out the travels of character in a story.
Google Lit Trips has many examples of teachers and students using Google Earth in literature courses. If you're not familiar with how to create placemarks in Google Maps, please see my free guide
Google for Teachers for directions.
4. Create 3D augmented reality book reviews.
ZooBurst is an amazing service that allows you to create a short story complete with 3D augmented reality pop-ups. Students could use
ZooBurst to create short summaries of books that really jump off the screen.
5. Create multimedia collages about books.
Glogster allows users to create one page multimedia collages. Students could create a collage containing videos, audio files, text, and images about books they've read. For example, a Glog about
Into the Wild could contain images of
Chris McCandless, chunks of text about the book, and
this video featuring a song from the movie based on the book.
15 comments:
This is super exciting! My kids are about to start book trailers (next week!) and we've already been using glogster! What a wonderful thing to see here!
I hate book reports and declared myself a book report free teacher this year. However, I had to come up with other ways of bringing reading into the classroom in an authentic manner, so here is the post I ended up writing about it. It is called "Instead of a Book report..."
http://mrspripp.blogspot.com/2010/07/so-instead-of-book-report.html
I will be adding these ideas to my arsenal, thank you for sharing them.
How do any of these do anything to improve the pedagogical or cognitive value of the exercise? Aren't these just jazzed-up book reports?
How do any of these do anything to improve the pedagogical or cognitive value of the exercise? Aren't these just jazzed-up book reports?
Josh,
That's a good question. At first glance, yes some (perhaps) all five suggestions are just "jazzed up" book reports. However, what I have found is that when students know that their work is going to become, for lack of a better term, a "performance piece" they tend to invest more effort and care not only in making their products look good, but also in making sure that they look for and include as much information and insight as they possibly can in their final products. In my experience this happens because classmates, parents, and others are much more likely to look at one of these short performance pieces than they are to read a two page book report. Therefore, the students creating the alternative book reports take care to include as many details as possible.
As clarification I'm not suggesting that traditional book report assignments are inherently bad. They're not. In fact, they can be excellent exercises in analyzing and writing. I'm simply suggesting that if writing is not the purpose of a book report assignment, there are alternatives that students can use to convey the meanings and main ideas of a book.
Richard
In my opinion, students learn more effectively when they are engaged and interested in what they're doing. I don't know many students who ENJOY writing book reports... at least, I think they'd be more excited about doing one of these suggestions.
Great post! I just played around with zooburst, and I can see all of the possibilities. I can't wait to try it in the classroom. I wrote about it on my blog and gave you a shout out: www.theteachergeek.com. Thanks!!
When it's a book "review" or "art piece based upon the book" you get more interest than a boring old book "report".
Authors are doing their own book trailers to promote their books, now, and it's so much fun!
These are awesome, but I went to the NCCE conference and listened to a teacher that contributes to Google Lit Trips and she suggested that newbie technology teachers should use the pre-made trips. Creating one uses computer code that is sometimes difficult to master. She said her first lit trip required many, many hours and not just a little bit of frustration. That being said, there are lots of really good pre-made lit trips! I just thought I would put that out there so people don't think they are super easy to let students create them. Happy technology all!
Lots of potential with these ideas! I would love to see a Google LitTrip for Darwin's 'On the Origin of Species'.
I have to agree that I am looking for varied ways for students to demonstate their knowledge of what they have read. These ideas seem much more exciting for the students and when they are excited they learn more. Not to mention the technology they will be learning in the process.
I have to agree that I am looking for varied ways for students to demonstate their knowledge of what they have read. These ideas seem much more exciting for the students and when they are excited they learn more. Not to mention the technology they will be learning in the process.
Also, try out <A HREF="http://www.pocketmod.com/>PocketMod</A>. Used this with 6th graders doing "book reports" on the Holocaust and it worked out very well.
Richard, I created a glogster on "The North Star" by Peter H. Reynolds and placed a photostory video on the glog for a book trailer. I hope to use that glog for staff development for teachers to use int he classroom. Love the book trailer ideas.
My lower level reading students did book trailers with Animoto and loved it. The carrot to finish reading their books & figure out the literary elements. Then when we did our Glogster project they asked it they could make an Animoto for it. They were the experts & could show the other students how to use it. It was great for their egos.
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