Book Clubs

I can't believe we are already almost finished with the semester. It's been a whirlwind. Students in all of our 8th grade Language Arts classes have been busy using technology for a variety of different activities connected to their Book Club book. We got our book club books on audiobook so that students had the option to listen to their book on the iPod Touch as they read. I formed groups on our class Ning so that students had a place to respond to what they were reading and could get feedback from their teacher and from other students. The feedback has not been able to be as frequent or instant as I had hoped because we only have six computers, but I found that students were excited about responding in this way. If we had more computers, the Ning would be even more effective. Students have also been taking turns using the computers to complete research for projects connected to their Book Clubs. Just recently, students used the computers to create their own hero as a pre-writing activity for their hero's journey creative story. The website is called Hero Machine 2.5 and the students absolutely loved getting to create their hero. I think it really got their creative juices flowing and hopefully, their final products written products will benefit from this activity. My students seem to be getting used to the different processes they have to go through to log in to Google docs and to our Ning. Some still need help, but overall, I think it is starting to get easier. I'm excited about next semester. There's so much more I wanted to accomplish by this point, but I have to remind myself that we got a slow start since we didn't get to kick off the year with the technology in place. I really feel like next semester, we can accomplish so much more since we'll have everything in place from the first day of school.