bookr.com Evaluation

Purpose/Brief Description
Interactive site. This site allows users to create online photo-illustrated books, using images downloaded from the user's site on flickr. Each image occupies a single page and the user can add a text description.

Learner Fit
This site is an excellent fit for lower levels of ELLs: the design of bookr books relies more heavily on the image than the text. Virtually every student today has a collection of photos, saved either online or on some sort of personal/local device. These photos, if not already resident on flickr, can easily be transferred there. Each person's collection of photos already tells a story...bookr lets them add text and places the selected pictures.

The site also meets several of the Conditions for Optimal Language Learning Environments, as listed in Figure 1-2. The concept and design of the site encourages the students to produce varied and creative language, another condition for optimal language learning. (The minimalist nature of the picture book format, when in the hands of a user who is passionate about the stories behind the images, can be a very powerful communicative tool.) Also, the asynchronous nature of the communication – the user can spend as much time as he/she wants to create their bookr book – helps to create a workable and balanced stress level. Learner autonomy in this application is near absolute, just pick your image and place your text.

Teacher Fit
This site is a good, though not excellent, fit for teachers. The teacher can monitor the creation of successive editions of a book, if necessary. By design, there are no special purpose teacher-oriented tools or features...just the bookr interface.

How Can It Be Used?
The picture book creation process lends itself especially to vocabulary building and basic composition.
The visual/textual connection, for learners of any language, is a proven and powerful tool. Moreover, students can build their own personalized books and not have to rely on other publications, printed or online. The process of creating the books, by its very nature, promotes inductive learning and learner autonomy.

Likes/Dislikes
Likes:
The minimalist approach of pictures/text/story has universal appeal. Moreover, the student has a built-in motivation to tell the story...the student would not have taken the photos or chosen other images unless they were meaningful in some way.

Dislikes:
The site lacks a direct text/category search interface. Instead, a word cloud is generated from the most popular categories and displayed on the main page. Thus, the user is limited to only those categories contained in the word cloud.