Book Review 2.0

I was approached by one of my eighth-grade language arts teachers at the beginning of the year about book reports. She requires her students to read 2 books per quarter and wanted to try some innovative ways to "track" their reading. So, I created a list of ideas for her (which I hope to blog about later), which she will pull from throughout the year.

For her first book project, she decided to go with Glogster book reviews. Glogster is a very teacher/student-friendly site with a separate education portal. So, we set her up with an account and created her student accounts as well . . . very simple!

In order to help her students write a quality book review to incorporate into their glog, I volunteered to do a 20-25 minute mini-lesson on writing book reviews. I did not feel like an expert on writing book reviews, but I found Steve Peha's ideas very helpful.

Here are the 3 resources I created to help the students learn: (all embedded below)
1. Google presentation - unfortunately the speaker notes do not embed along with the google presentation, so some slides at the end may not make complete sense


2. Handout

Writing Book Reviews

View more documents from MissMak.

3. Example


I am really excited about the direction we are headed. Each quarter the students will have critically evaluated their books utilizing a variety of media. Gone are the days of the standard written book report/review!

Glogs, Glogs, Glogs

While this is not the newest tool on the market, I think it is one of the best for educators! Within the past year, glogster has created an education portal for teachers to use with their students. This allows a teacher to create a safe environment for students. Now, students can create their glogs without worrying about running into an inappropriate glog or having an unwanted someone viewing their glogs.

It is so easy to sign-up for an education account. Just visit the edu portion of glogster and set up a class account. If you already have an account, you will want to create a separate account under the edu portal. Glogster will ask you how many student accounts you need and will create the usernames and passwords for you quickly. Within a matter of minutes you will have a separate, private account for each student all integrated within your master account.

An excellent way to display them is to embed the glogs on wikipages. However, there is also a print option and a link option.

There are some great tutorial videos available on creating and embeddinig if you scroll to the bottom of the home page.

Glogs are an amazing tool for your students to use. However, they are also a powerful tool for teachers as well. Use glogs to jazz up your webpage, create a study guide for students, create graphic organizers, host videos and/or audio libraries, create webquests, and much more!

Classroom Ideas:

History
- create timelines (using arrow graphics)
- create historical scrapboks (include pictures,
music, videos, info from the time period)

Language Arts
- create autobiography pages
- book reports
- use as a presentation tool instead of a PowerPoint
- create a poetry glog (find images and music that enhances a poem)

Science
- create an electronic textbook (each student creates a glog around a specific topic from the
chapter)
- create a glog illustrating the steps of the scientific method

Music
- create a glog about a specific composer/artist or genre of music (include sample audio)
- create music library for students around specific composers/artists/genres with some basic
information or links for additional information

Art - host pictures of student artwork

If you have any ideas of your own for using glogster with students, please leave a comment:)


Examples: View a wiki with glogs created by my 5th grade students.



Screen shot of glogster.com/edu taken using kwout.com.