Centennial Honors College
Western Illinois University
Undergraduate Research Day 2014
Podium Presentation
Online Classroom Novel Website: The Diviners by Libba Bray
Angel Samata, Noelle Johnson, and Chad Blair
Faculty Mentor: Rebekah J Buchanan
English
In today’s day and age, media and technology are considered one of the most
prominent forces driving the lives of students. Instead of going against the tide, it is our
job as educators to prepare students to be not only literate in the traditional sense, but
also when it comes to media. Media literacy is an opportunity for teachers to build on
the social and entertainment media surrounding our student’s lives, and turn it into a
meaningful academic experience that empowers students. My peers and I have created
an opportunity for media literacy by creating a novel website. A novel website is an
interactive page to help students through their journey of reading a book in an
accessible and creative way. The websites generally include discussion questions,
activities, links to author pages, book trailers, reviews and more. The novel website we
have created features an exciting young adult author, Libba Bray, and her novel, The
Diviners. We created the website by modeling it after a four week unit and goals that
support students learning through character development, identifying key themes and
ideas, as well as activating prior knowledge of history and interpretation. We found that
novel websites are just one of the amazing tools that can be used in the classroom to
incorporate technology into the learning environment that benefits both teachers and
students.