Book Reports for the New Millenium

http://www.ncsu.edu/midlink/bkfair/books.alive.html

Language Arts

Those who have taken my Hyperstudio minicourse will have seen the Book Report demo of Shiloh that I borrowed from Anderdon Public School. It's a great example of how to use the new technology to breathe life into a traditional learning activity.

Check out this site. The premise here was to take the Book Reports and share the student publishing with the world by placing it on the Internet. Each student work was created using Microsoft Powerpoint, a presentations package, and then posted to the website. Those visiting the site who don't have Powerpoint are prompted to download the freely available Powerpoint player.

While we don't have Microsoft Powerpoint available in all of our schools, the Ministry of Education has licensed a number of tools that will facilitate the same thing.

• Claris Homepage - An HTML authoring system that lets you create and save only in HTML format. 
• Corel Presentations - The product from the Corel WordPerfect Suite that enables you to create slideshow type presentations and save them directly to HTML for web publishing or Corel's own SHOWIT format which requires their own plug-in.
• Hyperstudio - From the Extras menu, select the Export a Webpage option. The Hyperstudio plug-in will be required to play the resulting stack from the webpage.

There are lots of ways to publish! What do you do with it when it's done? The resulting pages are easily viewed locally on your classroom computer. Or, how about putting them on the school's fileserver. Now, you're creating your own school intranet. Or, for the truly adventurous, post them to your school's website. In that manner, you are now prepared to share the reports with any parent who has Internet access at home.