Simple and free way to create a book review page.

[Vonder_Van_de_Veer]

Hi there

 

I'd like to find/create a simple book review page for our website.

Basically I want kids to fill in a simple form with their first name, book title, author and a field for the review itself.

Then I'd like the reviews' titles to be sorted alphabetically and be clickable to take the user to the review.

I was trying to figure out if there is a way to do it using google spreadsheets (which I use for discussion boards etc)

 

Anyone got any good ideas?

 

cheers

 

VVdV

[jdoyle]

does your library tool have a book review mechanism? We have Eclipse.Net which allows students to write reviews easily and get them approved by the librarian but it doesn't display reviews in a nice easy format as you're suggesting. (Screenshot of review view attached)

 

if you have Sharepoint, a document library could do the job.

 

any way you could use your VLE?

Edited February 2, 2010 by jdoyle
added Eclipse.net screenshot

[Vonder_Van_de_Veer]

Thanks for that...

Our Junior Librarian Software is currently on a standalone Windows computer (our network is Mac based), so I don't think we can use the review features in the ICT suite.

Our VLE is Fronter and I was thinking about making a Library page and using a forum as a sort of book review database but it would be pretty clunky and ugly - also we would not be able to share the childrens' reviews on the school website (which I'm keen to do).

We don't have Sharepoint...

 

So.. still looking but thanks all the same!

[SteveBentley]

Basically I want kids to fill in a simple form with their first name, book title, author and a field for the review itself.

 

I'd be inclined to try and normalise this a bit so that they're selecting the book details from a list somewhere - maybe start with the author search and then drill down to present a list of titles. That way you can store each of the reviews as relating to a particular book, so you don't get dozens of reviews of each Harry Potter novel and no easy way to aggregate them because they've all given the title in a slightly different way.

 

You could either try and export a listing from your library catalogue, or if you want to be a bit more sophistocated, Amazon's API is pretty handy for this kind of thing.

[jdoyle]

I wouldn't totally dismiss Fronter. It's possible for students to build a review document collaboratively (using the multiple author document). Close the document for editing and then exporting it will give you an HTML document in a zip file. It would need editing to fit in with your webpages though.

 

Alternatively, you could use the Fronter sound recorder to create simple audio book reviews. Though stored as SPX files, they can be converted to MP3 etc using VLC.

 

 

 

Alternatively, you could use an online book readers facility such as LibraryThing

 

Matilda by Roald Dahl | LibraryThing

 

It's possible to create a Group for the school, get parents online etc...

 

Groups Club Read 2010 | LibraryThing

 

but you may view it as a Social Networking site and not appropriate for your students.

Matilda.zip