Technology Department News

Digital Book Reviews – Using Moodle (iLearn)

Have you ever wanted to do a school-wide or classroom book review?  Moodle is a powerful tool that allows a teacher to do many types of projects with students.  A good example of how you can use Moodle for a project is doing Book Reviews.  With Moodle you can have a central location for book reviews written by your students.  Ratings, genres, comments and many other features can be added to create the ultimate book review.  You can totally customize the forms and look of the book review too!

Dearborn High School has been working on a book review project in the library.  Lets take a look at what they have done.  Click on the images below to enlarge.

Students must first find and enter the DHS Book Review course.  This is a simple course with only the Book Review Activity.

Database Activity Book Review

 

When they click on the Book Review activity they are shown a list of book reviews written by classmates.

list view

 

When a student clicks on title of a book they are taken to the review .

single view

 

They can also search for titles of interest using the search feature.

search

 

And finally, the student can add to the Book Review by using a simple form.   They upload cover art and their review in one easy-to-use form.

Add Book

 

Guess what?  If you are reading this from another school district and would like to be able to start your own book review you can download our template and customize it to your liking.  This is a preset for the Database Activity in Moodle.

Here is the download: Book Review-preset

If you are a teacher in Dearborn Public Schools and would like to have a book review for your classroom please contact Chris Kenniburg for help.  kennibc@dearbornschools.org