Using Computers to Teach Literature: A Teacher's Guide

Emphasizing the need for and offering new instructional strategies for the English classroom, this book demonstrates not only that teachers can do something about the effect of technology in the English classroom, but that they must. The book shows how electronic communication can, at every educational level, foster a natural collaboration between teachers and teacher-educators, schools and colleges, children and adults, and especially between authors and readers. After a preface and an introduction, chapters in the book are: (1) The BookRead Project (in which students in different parts of the country read good books and talked with each other about them over a computer network); (2) The Classroom; (3) The Literature; (4) Computer Conversation Basics; (5) Books on Computer; (6) Networks and Conversations Online; and (7) Introduction to the World Wide Web. Contains 25 references, a 156-item annotated bibliography of children's books, a 16-item annotated list of professional resources, and an 87-item list of additional resources. Appendixes present excerpts from "author chats"; a discussion of a reader-response workshop; a discussion of computer competencies and the language arts; and three articles ("A Simple Way To Integrate Technology into Your School" by Randy Pitts, "Exercise in Memory: Three Hyperfictions" by Howard Holden, and "How Literary Lists Are Changing the Way We Discuss Literature" by John Scott Kemp). (RS)