Interactive Lit Circles

Last week, my class tried approaching their literature circle meeting a little differently. Our class "met" online to conduct their first ever literature circle on the web. Groups met for 10 minutes before they went to the lab to discuss questions and thoughts on the chapters they had read. Each member of the group was to post a comment about their job for the literature circle meeting. Here is a look at our class's first digital meeting.

The next time our class meets in the computer lab for something like this I would like to encourage students to respond to others comments. The aspect that was missing in this activity was there was not much interaction between the groups. Although students had the chance to look at each others responses no students responded back. The whole point of meeting in literature circles is to have students interact with each other to deepen their understanding of the book they are reading. Communicating through different mediums is important, especially in the digital age. This activity, if guided appropriately with increased interaction between students, could be very beneficial to students communication and computer skills.