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High school English teacher shares how she plans on using QR codes to switch to a whole fiction approach to novels and literature in the classroom. 

"So What exactly are Google Lit Trips? The short version is simple. Google Lit Trips are free downloadable files that mark the journeys of characters from famous literature on the surface of Google Earth. At each location along the journey there are placemarks with pop-up windows containing a variety of resources including relevant media, thought provoking discussion starters, and links to supplementary information about "real world" references made in that particular portion of the story. "

Literature review for research on student boredom and teaching with Web 2.0 tools.

word clouds with style. Create shapes with word clouds

To Gerald Carey - As an English teacher, word clouds are a great tool. Taking text from literature or even from your own students' writing and placing it in a word cloud builder allows students to find theme words because the words used the most often are bigger than the others. I've used my students' quickwrite entries about a chosen piece of text and shown them that they are all thinking through the literature the same way. It's pretty eye opening for an English class!

Tagxedo turns words -- famous speeches, news articles, slogans and themes, even your love letters -- into a visually stunning word cloud, words individually sized appropriately to highlight the frequencies of occurrence within the body of text.

a high school English teacher highlights three ways she and her colleagues are using Twitter to engage students in and outside of their classrooms. A variety of complexity and purposes represented.

Jane Austen's novels, one chapter at a time, via podcast.

Keep in mind that this experiment was focused on "classroom use" of Kindles, not necessarily "library use." Libraries have never supplied the resources used directly in the classroom for literature study (students don't markup library books!). At Cushing Academy, we are using Kindles to support recreational and personal interest reading rather than directly supporting the curriculum. In that role, they have worked very well.

Well, maybe not just like plain old books. Ebooks have many nice advantages for libraries, such as 24/7 access, always pristine and readable copies for the user, built-in dictionary (which our students tell us they really like) and, for the library itself, very efficient use of space and staff time.

"Last fall, Princeton launched a small experiment, replacing traditional textbooks with the Kindle DX, Amazon's large e-book reader. Almost from the beginning, the 50 students participating in the pilot program expressed dissatisfaction with the devices. Yesterday, a university report offered some more definitive findings. On the upside, students using the Kindle DX ended up using far less paper. (Paper consumption was generally reduced by 54%.) On the downside, students complained that the Kindle was fundamentally "ill-suited for class readings.""

Share your thoughts and opinions on books you and your students are reading.