Let there be light...and enough characters

I experienced a couple bumps with the Nooks this week. Nothing major, but it wouldn't be a true pilot if I didn't share the snags alongside the positives.

One of these snags emerged during a simple attempt at humor. We are now well into Lloyd Jones' Mister Pip, a story that takes place on the island of Bougainville during the early 1990's. Due to a war over a copper mine, the mainland government shuts off all power and supplies to the island. While the island citizens struggle under these circumstances, one man on the island decides to run a school, which consists of reading Great Expectations to the children.

What else?

Look up a word.

Highlight.

Make a note.

These are the top these features my student have used on their Nooks. I’ve seen these features help my students effectively interact with Life of Pi. But just as in our final class discussion of LOP--when I want my students to dig deeper--I find myself asking, “What else?”

What else can our Nooks do?

It's a tool, not a magic wand

"Did that really happen?" is a common question as students read Life of Pi. A quick recap:

• Pi finds no conflict between science and religion; he double majors in biology and theology
• He also feels no need to pick one religion; he is a faithful Christian, Hindu, and Muslim.
• While on his way to Canada with his former zoo-keeping family, the ship sinks, and Pi is the sole survivor
• ...accept for the tiger, hyena, orangutan, and zebra also in Pi's lifeboat.
• After a few animal battles, it's just Pi and the tiger.
• Using his knowledge of animal behavior, Pi manages to train the tiger.
• Pi goes blind.
• Pi and the tiger talk to each other.
• Pi bumps into another blind man lost at sea. When this man tries to kill Pi, the tiger kills the man.

And we haven't gotten to the strangest part of the story yet. As you might imagine, a person like Pi who

A Nook Vocabulary Idea

You probably already know you can look up words on the Nook as they come up in the reading. For all my literature classes, I like having students point out words from the text they think are sophisticated, interesting, and/or ACT-level. This most certainly includes words they had to look up to understand. With the Nooks, my students could easily highlight such words and have a ready list when we talked in class.

So far, so good!

My students are half-way through Life of Pi by Yann Martel. They love the book, and they love reading it on their Nooks. I give students time in class to read, and one of my concerns was that some students might come to class without having charged their Nooks. This does not seem to be an issue so far.

First Nook Book Reading Assignment!

Pi Patel and his amazing journey will be the first story to emerge from my students' Nooks. I distributed the readers last Friday (we meet every other day for 90 minutes) just to give them a chance to explore on their own without having a reading assignment. Even though they all knew theirs would be the "Nook class," they still excitedly checked out their Nooks from the school library as if I, their teacher, were secretly letting them get away with something.

Before I forget, I do want to mention that as a part of this pilot, I created a set of surveys as one way to measure the Nook's effectiveness in a literature class. I administered the survey to all of my sections today. I will administer the surveys at the end of the semester as well.

Getting Ready: Summer of the Nook

What you see below took place between late July (when I walked out of Barnes and Nobel with 3 bags of Nooks--don't worry, I had a purchase order!) to September 1, 2011. At times the process frustrated my husband--because I bent his ears on my frustrations--but now that's all dissolved into excitement as I see the result: A well-organized, registered, and catalogued little row of Nooks waiting for my students. I envision the day I reveal the cart of Nooks to my classroom, the room will fill with a beckoning glow and a powerful operatic note. These Nooks, they are my children.

All right, enough drama. The following steps assume you have successfully purchased your Nooks. I would also highly recommend buying vinyl covers for them as well.

Getting Ready T-6 Months

Having been encouraged to put forth innovative ideas, especially those involving technology, I renewed the request for some sort of e-readers to be used in the contemporary literature class. This sort of technology had grown tremendously over the last couple years, So, despite the costs, I was hopeful.

Through a combined funding effort between our technology and curriculum departments, the English department received one Kindle and one Nook to pass around among teachers and trusted students. For about a month we explored and researched the difference between the two, imagined how students would use them, and tested customer support. While either could work for our purposes, we chose the Nook Simple Touch.

Getting Ready T-2 years

It was spring 2009, and I had been teaching a contemporary literature class for high school juniors and seniors for about five years. Knowing that I’d be able to select new titles in about two years, I began thinking about ways the class could be truly contemporary. Of course this would include the incorporation of newer titles, but those titles would have to last another seven years based on our district’s timetable for book selection.

Seven years.

Imagine all the titles that come and go within seven years. I wished there were a way to keep new titles in front of my students, to help them see their “now” society through the books  that grace best-seller lists, generate buzz, win awards.

E-Readers seemed to be a way. In fact, I thought, using electronic text might also save our district money. Given the cost of the e-readers and the e-text of more contemporary titles, however, I found that it would actually cost more.

Uh oh. Too much money. I let go of the idea, my helium balloon rising higher, shrinking, sailing further and further away until it was no more. Or so I thought.