From Readers to Reviewers

Ms. Greene is a primary grades teacher who wants to address one of the Language Arts standards for her grade level: Students will read and respond to literary text and share their responses with peers. She structures activities around one essential question: How can peer interpretations of literary text inform our reading choices?

While reading her Sunday paper, Ms. Greene realizes that the book review section is where she gets information about books in which she might be interested. She decides to create an online student review journal. This service will allow her students to post reviews of books that they have written that can be viewed, not just by Ms. Green, but by the world! Ms. Green has noticed in other projects she has done that simply knowing that their work will be seen by others outside the classroom seems to significantly improve the effort the students invest in their work and the quality of the resulting project.

Ms. Green creates the "Green Guide to Great Reads," an online review site for children's literature reviewed by children. Ms. Greene decides to build the site using the web-based version of WordPress. The Green Guide to Great Reads will be a site where any child can come in and either look up a book to see if a review is available, or browse through ratings and reviews to find a book that others seem to like. In the beginning, the review authors will be Ms. Greene's students, but the site will allow other students to complete a form and post a review. Her students will serve as the editors for the reviews of other students.

Ms. Green introduces the project to her students and is surprised at their excitement. Each student is given editor's rights to the content areas of the blog that she has created. She realizes that she needs to explicitly teach her students how to use this blog and incorporates time to do this in her lesson plan as an important classroom management strategy.

To begin the unit, each student selects a book that is a particular favorite to ensure that the journal will start off on a positive note. When the students finish reading the books, they use their laptops and a formatted book review guide, developed online as a Web form by Ms. Greene to compose their reviews.

Each student partners with another student in the class to peer edit their book reviews and send the revised versions to Ms. Greene for her feedback. They post their completed book reviews on the online journal. Students use "tagging" in the online journal to make it possible for other students to search for topics of interests. When the journal has over thirty book reviews posted, the students begin the next stage of the unit.

Each of the reviews has a comment area where other students reading the journal can add their own comments about the books. Ms. Greene reviews all the comments before they are released to the students, deleting any that are inappropriate. In the beginning there are few comments but as days pass, the journal is "discovered" by students from a number of locations. In addition, Ms. Greene sends out an invitation on several of the teacher-oriented social media sites that she visits and soon the journal is buzzing.

One of the most popular features of the journal is a voice annotation tool called Chirbit. Chirbit allows comments to be given as voice comments that after being reviewed by Ms. Greene, are automatically forwarded to students on their own android tablets, phones, or on their parents phones. By simply recording a response to a voice comment and emailing it from the phone, an operation simple enough even for her primary students, the student author of the review can respond quickly and efficiently. Soon the journal is buzzing with activity. Also within days, students from around the country are submitting reviews for publication in the journal. Ms. Greene organizes her students into editorial teams to review and select the best of the reviews for inclusion in the site.

By the end of the semester, students from around the country are using the journal to find books to read. Mondays are an important day in the classroom as Mrs. Greene displays the activity charts showing the increasing use of the site and a world map with dots representing use in countries literally across the globe. The students in Ms. Greene's class demonstrate through their own research that peer interpretations of text can inform peer choices.

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