Books to Blogs at Owen Middle School Laurel Hawkins Cindy Sturdivant Amanda Venturella Loretta Wilson

Our Inspiration Fan sites like “The Leaky Cauldron” Social networking sites like Facebook Message boards used in most university courses

Our Inspiration Teen Read week Second Life at The Public Library of Charlotte Mecklenburg County

Goals Create a virtual reading community that engages parents, teachers, and students

Learn about authors and books Discuss what they are reading Anticipate “coming soon” titles Suggest books for the media center to purchase Compare movies and books Participate in our school book club, even if they can’t attend Suggest more authors for fan sites Practice writing in a real-world setting Goals

Teachers will:  Interact as a reader with students  Link the wiki to their teacher webpages  Monitor trends in Young Adult literature

Goals Parents will:  Participate in the life of our school in a meaningful way  Open new, meaningful avenues of discussion by reading with their middle schooler  Develop an appreciation for Young Adult literature

Resources wikispaces audacity edublogs NCCAT existing author websites

Implementation Three teachers and our media coordinator spent five days at NCCAT. We created our wiki and added author sites.

Implementation We adapted our wiki so that students may not modify content, but may participate in the discussion boards. This wiki also allows us to limit membership to our school community.

Implementation Media coordinator procured permission from YA authors Darren Shan (Cirque du Freak) replied: that's fine. Darren

Implementation I would suggest this revision of your text: Author of the best-selling Books of Ember, Jeanne DuPrau has created a fast-paced series where nothing is certain other than change. A movie based on the first novel in the series, The City of Ember, was released in October Fans will be able to compare written magic to movie magic and see which one wins. The newest installment in the series, The Diamond of Darkhold, was published in August Thanks for including me in your site, Jeanne DuPrau

Implementation Media coordinator introduced our wiki to students during library orientation. Students were instructed to include their names and homeroom teacher in the request to join our wiki.

Implementation Mrs. Venturella’s students created podcasts of book reviews to post on our wiki.

Implementation Each teacher added an SSR page to our class blogs. http mrsventurella.edublogs.org :///

Success! Students love the discussion pages on our wiki. Our podcasts have had a lot of hits Positive feedback and participation from parents Participation from teachers in all content areas

Who knew? The kids are pretty lukewarm about our author pages. The on-demand writing test has minimized lab time.

Next steps Every staff member at our school will post a podcast Students will collaborate to create author pages Create a staff wiki sharing educational technology ideas

Next steps Extend the use of podcasts to all subjects Share our wiki with you