BookPod presentation at Carroll High School

As part of the course work for Immersion 360, my professor, a fellow classmate, and I traveled to Carroll High School to present BookPod, a project created by Sam and Van Hnem in EdTec 485, as a system to engage students in active reading and analysis of books they read. In Immersion 360, the class worked to refine and polish the concept behind BookPod with the intent to bring it closer to implementation in a school. While Carroll High School is mainly interested in exploring the blogging concept as a tool for learning, BookPod uses this core technique as its foundational technology. We met with the assistant principal and received some useful insight into the things that they were looking for and possible issues with this kind of solution. Since BookPod is built on the technique of blogging, we focused on that aspect. But we wanted to get away from the notion that blogging as a whole is bad. In this case, the blog provides a way for students to interact through a medium that they are comfortable with and able to teach themselves how to produce the content and put it on the web. The concept behind BookPod is strong and given the opportunity could become a very useful and powerful learning tool.