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[R]E-FOREST INTERACTIVE IS GO FOR LAUNCH!

A “beta” version of the [R]E-FOREST INTERACTIVE online community environments are now available. Not familiar with [R]E-FOREST INTERACTIVE yet? “reForestInteractive” will allow readers to connect with one another and with your authors as they do with everything else …online and with other social media tools.
We’ve set up a couple of resources to help you along with the award sites.
Participating Award Reading Program sites

http://www.bluespruceonline.ca
http://www.silverbirchonline.ca
http://www.mapleonline.ca (red maple)
http://www.whitepineonline.ca

You can visit here for an overview of the available functionality for your information as the supporting teacher or librarian, but please don’t feel that this should be distributed to your students: the application “should” be usable to students without instructions. If it’s not – we need to understand this.
Please note that the Red Maple site’s name is slightly different from the way the others are named; it doesn’t have its colour in the title.
Also, Red Maple and Silver Birch have more than one category. The books for each category can be viewed on their respective sites by selecting a category from a pulldown menu on the homepage of both sites; middle column, under “Which 2009 Nominees Have you Read?”

[r]e-Forest Interactive blog and information site
- Overview of the Forest of Reading program
- Recording of “Introduction of reForestInteractive for Teachers and Librarians” webinar
- Help guide to better understand the features on the award sites
- How-to tips for getting involved for teachers & librarians, publishers and the online community.
- Calendar of events and important dates.
- Contests and draw information.

Wikispace for book trailers
An extensive wiki (online reference guide) on book trailers, created for teachers and librarians to provide them with the knowledge to support their students in creating book trailers for the online community. These book trailers enter the school and students in a contest for a chance to win prizes. A wiki also allows its members to edit the content, to reflect current and updated information.
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To get started, a few suggestions you might offer your students:
Register
- You need to register, which is a very simple process
Rate and Comment on this year’s titles
- From the homepage of the site, simply rate those books they’ve read – and add a comment to share with others.
Build a Collection
- Every book that’s rated or commented on will get added to the “My Collection”. Students can also add favourite quotations, related videos, summaries and more. And they’re not limited to Forest titles for My Collection. Encourage them to add everything else they read in the last year … or two! Movies (DVDs) and music (CDs) can be added too. The idea is that they build a profile of themselves through what they read, watch and listen to.
Create and share a “Top Ten” list.
- Students can place books and other titles in an available list or they can create their own. ‘Books that I read over the summer’, ‘Favourite fiction book’, ‘Favourite books turned into movies’.
Share!
- You can ask students to share their Collections and Lists with you, by copying and pasting the URLs for these into an email.

Book Trailers
Book trailers are another important element of this year’s pilot projects. We do hope you’ll encourage your students to experiment with this medium. While we would like to encourage students to create videos for this year’s nominated titles, we will also welcome videos for other titles if you or your students would prefer.
Full contest details are available under “Contest” on each award site. As mentioned above, and online wiki is also available for teachers/librarians.
The final date for submissions will be Friday, April 24th – so there’s lots of time yet, to encourage your students to participate. The students themselves will vote on their favourites in early May – and we’ll also be showing highlights at the Harbourfront Festival of Trees.

Please remember that this is a “beta release” – that is to say, a preliminary release that will allow us to test various ideas in a live environment, before rolling the application out on a broader scale next year. We hope you will encourage your students to come test with us – to poke and to prod, to contribute and connect – and to share their feedback.
We hope you and your students will have fun with these new features. Please keep in touch with feedback or questions you might have.
Thank you so much for your interest and participation!