Monika Kovačič,  I. OŠ Žalec

I have been noticing in class that it is getting harder and harder to motivate students to read with interest the classic Slovenian literary works, such as the short stories by Ivan Cankar, Ivan Tavčar and Prežihov Voranc. I started thinking of a way to make these works of fiction more interesting for students so that they would read them through and have a constructive and effective discussion about them. I decided on a book club in an online environment, because the students are familiar with modern technologies, they like to use them and because they find anything related to modern technologies very appealing. I set up an online classroom for the 9. grade students, containing links to free e-books (E-knjiga.si) which allowed students to access and read the selected works. Also the discussion took place in this online classroom, with somewhat less conventional tasks that had them exchange opinions before, during and after reading. The students had to prepare a common reading log, and also (e-)materials for the final discussion in school. In school we also checked the work they had done. Here the emphasis was not on the teachers feedback by checking what the students had read – but on the students feedback. Through cooperative studying in the online environment they were actively co-creating the study environment as well as the study material. It was a combination of cooperation and independent studying using the ICT.