Book Talk Project
The “Book Talk Project” was set-up to create some excitement about books. Every summer students are required to read several books. We wanted students to reflect on the book they had 
enjoyed reading and to share their thoughts with others. We decided to use Photostory as the tool for constructing the book talk and the final product would be placed on a blog that was created for the honors 8th grade reading class. We were also using Photostory as an introduction to video and slideshow construction as well.
I was a little surprised that all of the students had no trouble selecting a book they had read. To increase the possibility that in the future that students have an enjoyable positive summer reading experience, the finished product will be placed on the honors reading blog called Book Talk(still under construction). The Book Talk blog will consist of book talks done by faculty and students. It will be a place to showcase book talks, but more importantly a resource for students helping them choose a book to read. On the Book Talk blog at this point are some samples done by the school librarians and soon students and faculty will add theirs to the blog.
It is a great idea to have a site related to books and reviews. Students today before going to a movie, restaurant, or reading a book go online and look at peer reviews. The book talks will be available as reviews or even a sales pitch for summer reading books. We hope this will help students choose books that are interesting to them and as a result more fun to read. We also hoped to improve student communication skills through the creation of the digital book talk.
To construct the book talks we used Photostory 3, a free program from Microsoft. In the past two semesters we have used iMovie. Students made a couple of digital slide shows earlier in the semester using the iMovie program. To help students with the process I provided video turorials for iMovie and for Photostory. The Photostory tutoorials are located at http://blog.woodward.edu/widener/?page_id=17
(Picture from http://www.loislowry.com/summer.html)
Files for Project:
Please feel free to use the files giving credit to David Widener and The Edutainers at theedutainers.com