Book Clubs (Online)

It's All About the Book: Motivating Teens to Read by Diane Lapp and Douglas Fisher
Wiki Literature Circles: Creating Digital Learning Communities by Elizabeth Edmondson
Digital Literacies: Online Book Clubs: Bridges Between Old and New Literacies Practices by Cassandra Scharber
Mini-Lessons For Literature Circles by Harvey Daniels and Nancy Steineke

Say:

     In Digital Literacies Cassandra Scharber gives us a look at how she uses technology to encourage students to read.  The idea here is that students are reading and writing all the time, they are just not doing it in the traditional way that English classes try to make them write.  When students are reading now, they are reading Facebook status updates and tweets.  They are writing one hundred forty characters at a time.  Digital Literacies suggests that we use this technology to have students talk about literature.  With the website that they suggest, Moodle, students get to post statuses about what the think of the books they are reading.  They can respond to each other as well.  This not only encourages people to read literature, but it also allows them to build a safe community to share their thoughts, similar to the reasons that O'Donnell-Allen suggests for having book clubs last week.  I completely agree with this article and think it speaks for itself.  I intend to try and use Moodle or similar formats in my classes in the future.
     Wiki Literature Circles was an exciting thing to read because Elizabeth Edmondson gives us an example of how these digital book clubs have worked in her classroom.  The results in this article sounded too good to be true if I'm being honest, but that is what makes it such an inspiring read.  That being said, I have a personal beef with wikis.  In my experience, wikis have been difficult to use and they don't do much more than other similar sites that are easier to use.  I think that some other good options are Weebly, or even Blogger.  As far as the actual philosophy of doing this goes I think it is a cool idea and I enjoyed reading about students getting excited about what they were reading through these communities.  Hearing about students getting excited about doing homework was interesting as well.
     I like that It's All About the Book gives us a scaffold for how we can organize our classes around book clubs.  I think that this set up is a good idea.  We begin with teacher led read aloud and think aloud and then move to having students do sustained silent reading.   From this, they branch out into their book clubs where reading moves from an individual activity to a group conversation.  The question that I had with this article is how do they make sure that students get their first choice.  In the reading for last week we learned to have students list their top three choices and then to make sure that if students didn't get their first two choices then they would get their first choice the next time around.  Lapp and Fischer suggest that we have students go to the book shelf and bring back books.  This seems like it could inspire chaos.
     Mini-Lessons for Literature Circles gives a lot of practical advice and lessons for us as teachers.  This text is not as much theoretical as it is practical.  It gives concrete examples of what we can teach with literature circles, steps to put these into practice, and ways that they can go wrong.  I particularly like the section about reading journals because Daniels and Steineke tell  us what to do when kids are writing in their journals.  It also tells us that the problems with journals are minor and that they are not writing about what the class is reading as a whole so it is hard for us to keep up with them.

Do:

     The lesson lan that I provide for this Do is in response to my discussion of Wiki Literature Circles.  In this lesson, I have students make posts and comments to other classmates through the use of wordpress.  Wordpress, like Blogger offers students the ability to post their own blogs.  They can each essentially create their own website for English class and make general posts either about class, what they're reading, or their literature circles.  I like this idea because it promotes that idea of a reading community in class.  Students are more likely to feel safe if they are able to see things that their peers are posting, and if they see things that I am posting.  Student websites offer a great chance for us to model for our students.  As we read our own literature, we can post thoughts, predictions, and observations about our texts.  Not only that, but it just makes our lives easier by having a substantial amount of student work online where we cannot possibly lose it.

Lesson Plan